U-pick farms in Florida: the month-by-month calendar

Florida’s u-pick calendar runs backward. The rest of the country picks strawberries in June; Florida picks them in January. By the Fourth of July — peak picking season from Michigan to Oregon — most Florida fields are finished, turned under, and waiting out the heat. This wrong-foots nearly everyone who moves here or visits, because the instinct to plan a summer picking trip is precisely the wrong instinct: summer is when most u-pick farms in Florida are closed or quiet. Here is the actual year, month by month, drawn from UF/IFAS extension publications and the state’s own crops-in-season chart — with the standing caveat that weather moves every window a week or two.

Why the calendar is upside down

Florida farms grow during the months most American farms can’t. Growers plant in September and October, harvest through winter and spring, and shut down when summer heat, humidity, and disease pressure turn field production into a losing bet. Around Plant City, UF/IFAS puts the strawberry planting window at roughly September 25 to October 20, and the crop is run as an annual — planted, picked, and pulled out inside about seven months. The FDACS seasonal availability chart reads like a northern chart flipped upside down: strawberries December through April, blueberries and peaches in April and May, mangoes May through August, avocados June into January. For u-pick planning, that means winter and spring are the main event, summer belongs to South Florida’s tropical fruit, and fall is planting time — quiet except for sunflowers and the last dragon fruit.

The u-pick year, month by month

Opening weekend is a farm-by-farm, year-by-year fact, but the shape of the season is stable:

• December–March: strawberries. UF/IFAS puts the core harvest at December through the end of March, on roughly 16,000 acres concentrated in Hillsborough, Manatee, and Polk counties around Plant City. FDACS lists berries into April, but late fields get picked hard — go early in the window for first choice.
• April–May: blueberries. Florida’s southern highbush varieties were bred by UF/IFAS to ripen in April and May, when almost nobody else in the country has fresh berries — that scarcity window is why the state’s 7,000-plus commercial acres exist at all. The season opens in the central part of the state and finishes in North Florida.
• April–May: peaches. Florida grows low-chill varieties — some needing only 100 to 250 chill units, where UF-bred names like ‘UFSun’ and ‘UFBest’ get by on about 100 — that ripen in April and May, ahead of fruit from other Southeastern states and California. UF/IFAS notes they can be grown from the Panhandle as far south as Immokalee.
• Spring and fall: sunflowers. UF/IFAS gardening guidance has annual sunflowers seeded in late winter, blooming in mid-spring, and declining quickly once early-summer heat arrives, with fall plantings producing a second show — which is why sunflower u-picks run spring and fall, never July.
• May–September: mangoes. Most varieties mature May to September, per UF/IFAS, almost entirely in South Florida. It’s less u-pick than grove stand, but it’s the state’s great summer fruit.
• June–November: dragon fruit. UF/IFAS puts the ripening season for the common white-fleshed pitaya at June to November — one of the few crops on this list that genuinely enjoys a Florida summer.

Two threads run through that list. First, breeders built this calendar on purpose: UF/IFAS developed about 88 percent of the strawberry varieties in Florida fields, and since 2005 nearly all of the state’s blueberry acreage has gone into UF/IFAS southern highbush cultivars — roughly 20 million pounds of fruit a year, worth about $75 million at the farm gate, from crops engineered to hit windows nobody else can. Second, geography sets the clock: the farther south the farm, the earlier its window opens, so two Florida farms three hours apart can be honest strangers to each other’s schedules.

What can you pick in a Florida summer?

North of Lake Okeechobee: honestly, not much. Many u-pick operations close entirely from June through September, or pivot to events while the fields rest and next season’s beds get built. The real summer harvest belongs to South Florida — mangoes at peak, Florida avocados starting a run that stretches into winter, dragon fruit in season June through November. If a Central Florida stand is piled with strawberries in July, those berries traveled.

The other summer reality is weather. Afternoon storms close fields on short notice, and June 1 opens hurricane season, which can reshuffle a farm’s hours for a week at a time. A summer visit rewards a same-day check more than any other season’s.

Before you drive

U-pick information ages badly everywhere, and faster in Florida, where the seasons are short and the weather is dramatic. A field loaded on Saturday can be picked out by Wednesday; a farm that opened for strawberries in December may close for the year in late March with no ceremony. Call, check the farm’s latest posts, or use a directory that shows its work — the FarmHop Florida directory at farmhop.farm/fl tracks 3,635 farm and stand listings, 1,998 of them verified live, each with a verification badge and a last-checked date, and the free iOS app puts the same map in your pocket.

Then trust the field over the calendar. Every window above is an honest approximation; the row in front of you is the fact. If the farm says the berries peaked last week, take the jam berries at the discount and come back two weeks earlier next year. The calendar’s real job is telling you when to start paying attention.