Hale Groves

Hale Groves

9250 US Highway 1
Wabasso, FL  32970

772-581-9915

www.halegroves.com
scroll down past the fruit photos to get to website information

AT A GLANCE:  Hale Groves
Date of Visit:	Saturday, March 11, 2017
Parking	Plentiful in parking lot
Amount of time needed to peruse exhibits:	30 minutes, 10 minutes of that is for ice cream.
Amount of time needed for gift shop	30 minutes.
The “must have” souvenir	Frog Jam, only $5.99.
Online shopping	None
Kid friendly shopping	Definitely
Kid friendly	Yes
Dress code	Casual shorts, t-shirts and sandals are perfectly acceptable.
Be sure to…..	Hale Groves offers samples of their juice.  Live on the edge and try the grapefruit.  It might just change your mind.
Nearby/other establishments to visit	Nothing is located nearby.  This is a place alongside the road, and is a good place to stop when returning from elsewhere.
Walkability, general downtown area / amount of traffic	No place to walk to
Safety, in terms of type and number of crimes committed in general area	This is a generally safe area.  However, practice good sense and stow your valuables out of sight and lock your car.

The Florida gift shops that I’ve reviewed up until now are located some distance from each other, with most of them sited at least 45-minutes from Melbourne, Florida which is my home base, and they encompass several counties in Central Florida.  Driving or riding in a car or bus is an easy thing to do, but it’s tiring for both the driver and passenger.  I have a DOR mentality, with DOR meaning “drive on regardless.”  It’s not in my nature to make stops along the way, because I want to get home and put my feet up to achieve total relaxation.  My mantra could be:  “don’t make me stop.”  

However, something delightful happened to me last week, and it was enough to change my DOR ways.  The temperatures were in the mid-80s already, owing to an above average winter with temperatures 10 – 20 degrees higher than normal.  We were headed north, returning from hiking a natural area just south of Vero Beach.  I’ll be honest here:  I couldn’t stop pissing and moaning about pert-near everything.  It was hot, and my feet and knees were feeling the upshot of hiking 3 miles in rough terrain.  Uphill.  Both ways.  I just wanted to go home, enter my relaxation zone, and have an adult beverage.  Or, two.  Every word that came out of my mouth during the drive from Vero Beach was heavily tinged with my whining:  “can’t you driver faster?”  “I want to go home”  and  “my knees hurt.”  I don’t remember the rest of my cranky conversation.  Our car made a sudden right hand turn into a parking lot, where I feared I was going to have to walk the rest of the home as punishment for being so miserable.  At first, the parking lot and accompanying building looked sketchy, so I had to be carefully coaxed from the car.  Now, I wouldn’t say that I was actually snarling, but “DOR” kept running through my mind, along with that nice glass of wine.  Sigh…  The sooner I get out, look around, and take a few pictures, the sooner that the glass of Merlot would be in my hand.  From the parking lot, we headed toward the entrance of Hale Groves.

Once inside, one of the first things I saw was a sign which read “Fresh Citrus.” Both words were underlined to convey the importance of this.  My cantankerous self mused loudly:  “I would hope they have fresh citrus, since they operate orange groves.”  The word “hope” was vocally underlined to convey its importance.  Black and white photos hang on the wall directly beneath the citrus sign.  There’s a shot of some guy surrounded by three other men and they are all admiring a Northwest Piper plane.  No clue as to who they were, but the black and white photo made me think that this was important.  If it were a placard, it would be underlined.

The inside of Hale Groves reminded me of the folks who set up shop by the sides of the road selling gator jerky, boiled peanuts, local honey, and various fruits and vegetables, the difference being that this was a much larger operation.  It felt like a trustworthy place because of the amount of produce that it had for sale.  Hale Groves has a tasting station set up, with samples of either orange juice or grapefruit juice.  Try the grapefruit.  Just so you know, I wouldn’t try it when I first moved here.  Finally, I did and discovered that fresh grapefruit juice bears little resemblance to the canned or concentrated stuff.  There’s more, though.  A goodly amount of floor space is occupied by barbeque sauces, handmade soaps, jams / jelly and the like, items produced by local residents targeted toward tourists and travelers.  Amidst the preserves, I spotted something called “frog jam.”  To say the least, my curiosity ran amok.  I squinted at the frog jam jar looking for froggy body parts, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.  I was relieved and disappointed.  Looking back, I wished we would have bought a jar of it.

The entrance to a large storage area is in the vicinity of the frog jam.  It looks like a storage area for surplus oranges and grapefruit at first glance, and it may be tempting to skip this area.  Don’t.  The folks at Hale Groves have fun souvenir-type items displayed right next to the citrus.  Take advantage of the great opportunity to purchase some unique Florida items to use as gifts.  It’s easy to do, as there are selections of orange tea, orange-scented hand lotion, orange-flavored lip balm, and orange-shaped sippy cups.  Fresh picked oranges are for sale, too. 

Hale Groves is a great place to bring children.  They can shop for themselves, selecting from candy, sunburn popcorn or pelican seeds.  To me, pelican seeds fall into the category as frog jam.  Do pelican seeds come from pelicans?  I’m not certain, and I’m ok with that.  Sometimes it’s best not to know.  By the way, coconut patties are a big deal in Florida and the ones here looked especially chocolate…oops…tempting.  Yes, that’s what I meant.  They looked tempting.

Take some time and walk around a few times, as to not miss anything.  While Hale Groves doesn’t carry shot glasses, they do sell travel mugs.  I made an exception for coffee cups being a suitable alternative if no shot glasses are available, so let’s do the same with travel mugs.  I didn’t come across any refrigerator magnets or branded wearables, but that doesn’t mean that this place is still not a great place to shop.  After all, it’s not a museum or botanical gardens, but a place for Hale Groves to sell fresh produce.

There are two counters at Hale groves:  one for the purchase of fruit, veggies and souvenirs and the other for soft serve ice cream.  The ice cream counter is located to the left of the main counter, and although Hale doesn’t seem crowded, there is usually a line at the ice cream counter.  Practice patience and spend the time waiting deciding whether to try ½ orange & ½ vanilla or the all-orange soft serve. I went with the ½ and ½ cone, because of the novelty of orange soft serve ice cream.  I found both flavors refreshing.  It makes sense to make this the last stop inside the store, so melting ice cream doesn’t get everywhere.  Outside and to the right of the front entrance is a wonderfully shaded area where sitting on the benches or at picnic tables is pure tranquility.  Let the young ones run around.  Take a lazy look at the orange groves out back, approximately 50 yards (1/2 of a football field) from the shaded patio.  So often the fruit we buy at the grocery store comes from California, Argentina, or some other faraway place.  It gets picked and hauled great distances to be offered for sale at the local grocery store.  We may think that we’re eating fresh fruit, but we’re not.  It takes time to process and package fruit for shipping and this lengthens the time between grove and grocery store.  At Hale Groves, I could walk to their nearby orange grove, pick an orange, walk back, and still have most of my ice cream to finish.  The citrus for sale at Hale Groves is “shipped” a few yards to the back of the main building, where it is either put on display or squeezed into juice which is bottled on premise.  This shifts the mindset of what “fresh,” as in “fresh fruit,” really means.

Photos from Meet Me in the Gift Shop Facebook Page

Happy, cranky, or tired, make a point of stopping at Hale Groves on US Highway 1 between Melbourne and Vero Beach, Florida.  Buy frog jam, orange-flavored lip palm and sunburn popcorn.  Have orange ice cream, sit outside and take a gander at the adjacent orange grove.  It’s all good, the significance is there.  No underlining necessary.

Note:  I chatted up a Hale Grove employee who told me that Guy Fieri, host of the Food Network show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” had visited the previous week.  Hale Groves will be part of his show airing toward the end of July or beginning of August of this year.  


A personal message:
 

Blogger, my blogging software, again isn't allowing me to post all photos of Hale Grove.  Please click the link above to get to the "Meet Me in the Gift Shop" Facebook page.