FLORIDA’S NATURAL GROWERS VISITOR CENTER, LAKE WALES FL

Learning how things are grown, manufactured and delivered is interesting to us.  When we learned that the Florida’s Natural Juice Company had a visitor center that covered these topics we were more than ready to go see this free exhibit.

From Winter Garden it was a little bit of a drive, but not too bad.  It let us see an area of Florida we hadn’t really visited before and gave us an outing.

The brochure had said we could see a citrus grove and learn various things.  There were of course free samples as well.

So when we pulled up and saw that the “grove” was just a few trees near the citrus center with big signs telling us to leave the fruit for the workers to harvest we were a little disappointed.  Not to mention the fruit didn’t look all that good that was on them.  Definitely not what you purchased in the grocery and definitely not what they show as the “grove” on their television commercials. But then “home grown” produce is never that pretty anyway.

The tour starts in the gift shop with the free samples of their juices to drink.  From there you go through a doorway where there are several exhibits, videos and narratives to view.  It was interesting to us, but a much smaller set up than the similar one we had seen on Bush Beans.  The movie that was shown in a small separate theater was interesting.  Seeing how commercial citrus growers planted and cared for their trees was educational.

One of the things I learned is citrus does not continue to ripen once it has left the tree.  It simple gets old.  The flavor does not get better or sweeter like it does on so many fruits.

I also learned it takes over a year to produce a single crop of citrus fruit from pollination to ripe.  That might explain part of the cost of citrus fruit.  It definitely explains why one really bad frost or freeze can ruin crops for more than a year.

There were displays on canning and equipment that make you realize how far we have came in food preservation and samples of War World II rations that included Donald Duck orange juice.

All in all the drive was well worth the effort.

151