Pine Island Fruit Market has a wide selection of mango varieties.
By David McRee at BlogTheBeach.com
We drove down to Pine Island today in search of my favorite fruit: ripe mangoes. We hit the jackpot! We also bought 4 pounds of lychees and a couple of medium-sized sapodillas. If you don’t know what those are, I’ll cover them in another blog post in the next week or so.
Pine island is a rather large island in the mouth of Charlotte Harbor between Cape Coral and the barrier islands of Sanibel, Captiva, North Captiva, and Cayo Costa. It has no beaches, but it has a lot of tropical fruit groves of all kinds.
The Pine Island Fruit Market is open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in June, July, and August from around 10am to 4pm. It can be hard to find, but is located just to the east of Stringfellow Road on a little dirt road called Ficus Tree Lane. If you look for it on Google Maps, look for the intersection of Valeria Road and Stringfellow Road. It’s on the northern half of the island.
Get there at 10am for the best selection. Some fruit lovers are known to come and buy ALL the fruit of a certain variety. This morning, just after we bought 4 pounds of lychee fruit, a man came along and bought all of the lychees that were remaining. Mangoes generally are $1 per pound, lychees are $4 per pound, guavas $3 per pound, sapodillas $2 per pound. It adds up fast. We spent $43 and wished we’d bought more lychees.
Another great thing they offer is mango smoothies. They seem to just offer those on Saturday and Sunday (they spend Friday preparing and slicing the fresh mangoes that go into the smoothies).
Now there is someone on the premises that sells smoked mullet and smoked mullet spread, and I think fried fish too. We didn’t buy any today because I promised Sue that I would take her to Peace River Seafood in Punta Gorda for lunch.
The selection of fruit at the Pine Island Fruit Market.
If you like festivals, Pine Island has an annual festival called MangoMania. This year it is being held on July 11 and 12, 2009.
