For all the Florida bashing that goes on here, let me just tell you....Florida kicks ass right now!

[csziggy]

11. The best strawberries for the East Coast are grown in Plant City, Florida

While California strawberries might be excellent, by the time they are shipped east, they are past their prime.

One of the reasons that Publix grocery stores have good produce is the farming in Central Florida. Publix buys directly from some of the farms and ships the produce to their stores on their own trucks. The Plant City strawberries we get here in Tallahassee left the fields usually only a day or two before we pick them up in the stores.

When I was a kid growing up fifteen miles from where Publix started Mom used to buy strawberries at the farm stands along the roads between Bartow and Tampa. Once Publix built a store in Bartow, she bought her strawberries there - their produce managers were better at picking good strawberries and they were not more expensive from the store than they were at the farm stands.