USA Tree sells fruit trees and edible gardens in Central Florida. We are an FDACS-licensed nursery, which means the growing ground is registered with and inspected by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, and every plant that leaves here carries the certification the state requires.
Why edibles come first
The stretch of County Road 44A between Eustis and Umatilla is one of the densest nursery corridors in Florida, and almost all of it is ornamental and landscape stock sold wholesale. That is a fine business and it is not ours. We sell things you can eat: mango, avocado, low-chill peaches and plums, lychee, longan, jaboticaba, bananas, berries, and the perennial greens that keep producing through a Florida summer when every annual vegetable has given up.
We do also sell houseplants, which is worth squaring with the paragraph above. What we are not is an ornamental grower. The houseplants are not grown here, we claim no particular expertise in them, and they ship direct from a specialist partner rather than coming off our benches. Every one of those listings says so. The fruit is the part we grow, the part we know, and the part we will argue with you about.
Food you grow is different food
This is the part we actually care about. A mango picked ripe off your own tree and eaten the same day is not the same food as one picked hard and green so it could survive a lorry, and no amount of shelf life closes that gap. Vitamin C and folate start falling in most produce from the moment it is cut, and the varieties bred for shipping are chosen for skin toughness and uniform ripening rather than for what is inside them. Growing it yourself is how you skip all of that.
It is also why the range is not only fruit. Moringa leaves are among the most protein-rich greens you can grow, and the tree will put on several feet in a season and come back from a stump after a freeze. Turmeric and ginger come out of Florida sand tender and aromatic rather than fibrous. Katuk and chaya keep cutting through a Florida summer when every annual green has bolted or died. These are ordinary food plants that happen to be unusually worth eating, and they grow here without a fight.
Where our plants come from
Three places, and we would rather say so plainly than let you assume.
Grown on at our nursery. Much of what we sell arrives here young, as a liner or a small container, and spends three months to a year on our growing ground before it is offered for sale. It moves into a bigger pot, puts on real root and top growth, and lives through a Central Florida season before it reaches you. That is how nurseries have always worked, and it is the part that matters: a tree that has already taken a summer and a winter in this climate is a tree that will not sulk when you plant it in the same one.
Finished stock from Central Florida growers. Some of what we carry we buy from the wholesale nurseries around us, the same growers who supply garden centres across the state. We buy from them because they are twenty minutes away rather than two states away, so nothing spends three days on a truck before it reaches a customer.
Everything edible we sell comes from one of those two, which means it was grown in Central Florida, in this soil and this climate, by people who have to live with the result.
Shipped direct from our growing partner. The houseplants are the exception, and they are the reason this section says three rather than two. They are grown by a specialist in another state and sent straight to you from there, so they never reach our benches, we never inspect them, and they are not covered by our Florida nursery registration. They also cannot be collected at the market or delivered in our van, because they were never here. Every one of those listings says all of this on the page, before you choose a size.
Why the varieties are what they are
Choosing the right variety matters more than anything you will do to a tree afterwards. A peach that needs 800 chill hours will never fruit here no matter how well you prune it. A seedling mango becomes a forty-foot tree that shades out everything you planted around it. So we stock grafted, named, low-chill and dwarf selections that have been trialled in this climate, and we say plainly on every listing what zone it wants and how big it gets.
How we sell
Retail sales happen from our booth at Renninger's Flea Market in Mount Dora every Saturday and Sunday. We set up on Friday evening and bring whatever is left back to the nursery when the market closes on Sunday. You can also order online for pickup, local delivery nearby, or shipping. Larger containers and field-dug trees are pickup or local delivery only, because boxing them damages them and we would rather not sell you a tree that arrives broken.
The business
USA Tree is a d/b/a of Perkins Family Partners, LLC, a Florida limited liability company.