A worker picks up a load of Astin Farms strawberries at the company’s packinghouse in Plant City, FL. (Photo by Chip Carter)

Despite its name, Astin Strawberry Exchange of Plant City, FL, has much more to offer than the fruit its best known for, and it’s proving that with its spring vegetable deal.

The strawberry season was a fight for Florida growers this spring from start to finish. However, Astin still managed to make headway with a new label, Astin Family Farms.

“We opened a new company for the berries this year, “Astin Family Farms,” that went well having a new label, we had some good response from it,” said the company’s J.R. Pierce.

Astin also acquired a new farm for this season in Riverview, FL, about a half-hour west of Plant City.

“That’s where the vegetables are coming out of, it’s a big farm, about a 500-acre piece of property, and we’ll have hopefully 200-250 acres of strawberries there next year so we’ll be good,” Mr. Pierce said.

Meanwhile, the company’s eggplant and squash crops are looking very good and will start earlier than in typical years due to an exceedingly mild winter even by Florida standards. Unlike some crops that stop bearing later in the season, those two keep bearing well into summer, so the early start will mean additional business for Astin rather than an early end to the season.

“We started harvesting squash in late March, so it is early, and our eggplant will also be earlier than normal; probably mid- to late-April we’ll get going compared to May, so that’s one of the benefits of the heat,” Mr. Pierce said. “We actually went in here just a couple of days ago and put some more squash in the ground so we’ll have some squash that are later into May. And the eggplant we’ll have a long time as well. We should go all the way through the end of May and into the beginning of June. We had some early plantings and we saw that they were early so we were able to go and put second plantings in. We should be able to keep it going all the way until June, until Georgia’s really rolling big time. We should have a pretty good window here hopefully.”

Not only will Astin have increased volume due to the additional plantings, it also increased its vegetable acreage. Add in 150 acres of cantaloupe and things will be busy at the Strawberry Exchange well into early summer.

“We’ve increased a little bit on squash, eggplant is about the same, we also grow cantaloupe and we have a pretty good crop,” Mr. Pierce said. “All together we’ll have 250-300 acres of squash, eggplant we have 70 acres this year, the cantaloupe deal should begin right at the beginning of May and it looks like we’ll hit the Memorial Day pull just right on this year, so that’s good.”