About

SweetSong Groves grows and markets tropical and subtropical fruit on Florida’s southwest coast. It’s our good fortune to be a “hobby business.” So we can grow fruit the way that most commercial growers would love to, were it not for the relentless price competition from industrialized agriculture and its destructive practices. Our mission is to produce the highest quality, healthiest, and freshest fruit possible, to educate buyers and expand the market for local fruit, to support other growers, and to enrich the ecology on our land.

Our principal location is a 2-acre residential property in a semi-urban setting in north Sarasota County (under the red lychee fruit on our logo). The plantings include more than 150 subtropical and tropical fruit trees, also bananas, papayas, oaks, slash pines, bee and butterfly-supporting native plants, ornamental shrubs, and tropical vegetables. About 120 of the fruit trees are planned as commercial producers, including mangos, avocados, canistels, carambolas, sapodillas, jaboticabas, lemons, black sapotes, wax jambu, white sapotes, (grafted dark) Surinam cherries, longans, loquats, and lychees.

SweetSong Groves is a registered Florida Nursery. We have examined the requirements and processes for organic certification and decided that it is not for us, but our growing practices are, in our opinion, an improvement on the certification requirements. 

Influenced by permaculture, we work with Nature, not against her. We think in terms of ecologies. Toxic agents put into the ecology spread through the system, pushing it out of balance and often leading to effects worse than the original problem. We avoid them to the maximum extent possible, which is pretty much completely. Instead, we enrich the ecology at every level. Our ecology, and thereby our trees, is nourished mainly by clean wood-chip mulch, dropped off by our tree-pruner friends who bring it to us instead of taking it to the county dump site.

We regard marketing as a project of education. We know that increasing consumer knowledge about the wonderful subtropical and tropical fruits that grow in our local area will expand the market enormously. Over time, our website will develop as an educational resource for consumers and growers, with more and more information about tropical fruit, and how to grow it if one wishes. We give classes in tropical fruit horticulture, and tours of our groves. We support the tropical fruit organizations in our area.

Finally, we are local. That means not just that we live near our buyers, but also that our production is transparent— SweetSong fruit has an identity. You can look up our actual trees, see photos of them and learn their histories. Our growing practices are transparent. We are proud of our fruit and of everything that goes into it.