A Loxahatchee Groves Summer Field Guide: What's Open, What's Paving, and Where the Fruit Actually Is

Drive west on Okeechobee Boulevard in mid-July and the Groves does something the coastal towns don't. It gets quieter, not louder. The Saturday market pole barn is dark. The chef dinners are on hiatus. Half the "farm season" calendar you saw in the winter town newsletter has rolled over to the next one. If you moved here from Palm Beach or Wellington in the last twelve months, the instinct is to read this as slack season. It isn't.

Summer is when the Groves feeds itself instead of feeding the seasonal restaurant trade. The tropical fruit crop is peaking, the town paving crews are working through a lettered-road list that residents have been waiting on for two decades, and the businesses that stay open year-round are the ones that were never built around the show-circuit calendar in the first place. Here is the working map for the rest of July and August.

The season everyone talks about is the one that just closed

The 8,500-square-foot pole barn at Swank Specialty Produce on North Road is the reference point most residents use when they describe the Groves to friends. It is also the single biggest reason summer feels empty if you rely on it as a barometer. The Swank Saturday farmers market runs October through May. The Swank Table dinner series, which staged ten al fresco chef dinners this past season, wrapped in April. The March 8 Mediterranean-themed dinner benefiting the Wellington Historical Society, with chefs Josh Elliot, Eric Baker, John Kreidich and Lee Mazor, was one of the closing dates on the 2025–26 calendar.

That schedule is a deliberate rhythm, not a gap. Darrin and Jodi Swank built the farm in 1996 on twenty acres and now grow more than 350 varieties of pesticide-free vegetables, edible flowers and microgreens under hydroponic shade houses. The public-facing side of the operation is timed to the season the chefs and the ticket buyers actually show up for. Summer is when the growing gets done.

If you are new here, the useful thing to know is that "Swank is closed" doesn't mean the Groves is closed. It means one specific 20-acre parcel is not currently hosting the public. Every other agricultural business in town runs on a different clock.

Where the tropical fruit is right now

July and August are the working months for South Florida tropical fruit. The produce stand at 13527 Okeechobee Blvd. is the practical answer for most residents: pink guava, quenepa, avocados, carambola, starfruit, dragon fruit, coconuts, mangosteens. This is inventory you cannot get at a chain grocer at any price, and it moves through the counter in a matter of days.

A partial list of who is actually growing and selling right now, drawn from the current Yelp and Tripadvisor listings for 33470:

• Naga Gardens — sapodilla, lychee, and mail-order tropical fruit direct from the grove.
• You Farm — small-scale specialty produce and holiday-adjacent field visits.
• Caribbean Plants and Produce — Caribbean staples, banana varieties, seasonal mangoes.
• Guido Family Farm, Rayshell Ranch, Twilight Ranches, BnBFarmsFL — small operations with variable summer hours, worth a phone call before the drive.
• 24 Karat Ranch and Abel Tree Farm — ornamentals and specimen trees.

A note on Palm Beach Sunflowers. The maze that ran a long February weekend earlier this year is not open in summer. Sunflowers in South Florida bloom on a cool-season schedule, and the u-pick admission model, which was $10 admission and $1 per stem at the closing weekend, returns next winter. If you have out-of-town guests hoping for the Instagram photo, this is a January-through-March conversation.

The paving list is a lifestyle document

Almost every other neighborhood in Palm Beach County treats road maintenance as background noise. In Loxahatchee Groves, the paving list is the single most-read item in the monthly newsletter, and the Town posted a notice on July 15, 2026, that N.E. Road was being paved that day.

The reason paving matters here more than elsewhere is a two-letter acronym: OGEM. Most of the lettered roads in town — A, B, C, D and the rest — were originally surfaced with Open Grade Emulsion Mixture, a low-cost stabilization method paid for by direct assessment on the landowners who lived on each road. It was cheaper than asphalt and, in exchange, cheaper is what it delivered. Sections have washboarded, drainage swales have filled in, and by the late 2010s several segments were effectively impassible after heavy rain.

The town has been unwinding that inheritance one contract at a time. The B Road South project ran over $1.3 million. A Road was voted for full two-inch asphalt with speed tables and thermoplastic striping in 2021. The current 2026 paving activity, including N.E. Road, is another leg of that same list. If you own an equestrian property, the surface of the road your trailer turns onto is not a cosmetic detail. It is the difference between a routine haul to WEF grounds and an axle repair.

The Town Hall at 155 F Road publishes the current paving plan and the Roadway Equestrian Trails and Greenway Advisory Committee agenda on loxahatcheegrovesfl.gov. Newer residents can subscribe to Grazing the Groves, the town newsletter that launched in March 2026 and has become the most reliable single source for hearing about a road closure before you drive into it.

What actually stays open Thursday through Sunday

For the resident who wants dinner tonight, not a chef dinner in November, the summer roster is narrower than the season roster but consistent. Boonies Wild West Saloon on Southern is the anchor. It runs a full food menu and doubles as a live-music venue: the "Electric Blue" debut on the Boonies stage in late May was typical of what the summer calendar looks like there. Lewis Prime Grill, associated with the Okeechobee Steakhouse group, is the quiet-dinner option locals default to when they want something closer than downtown Wellington. Bella Cucina handles the Italian side. Everything else on the yelp 33470 list — Smackin' Smash Burger, Turning Point, Shawarma Station, Agliolio, Spiro's Taverna of Wellington, Jabrewski's — sits just over the town line and is on most residents' rotation whether the map says Groves or not. Culver's at 15339 Southern Blvd. is the late option, open until 11:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday.

If your summer routine is more errand than event, Tractor Supply on Southern is still the reason most equestrian and small-livestock owners in the Groves do a single stop instead of three. That is not a glamour destination. It is a workday fact.

A summer weekend that reads as local

For anyone rebuilding a July or August calendar around what is actually happening rather than what is advertised in the winter tourism guides:

• Coffee & Horses at Ark Farms, 6196 Ellis Lane, has run as a Saturday morning drop-in with coffee and rescue horses.
• Petting Farm Day at the same Ellis Lane address is a Sunday afternoon option for families with small children.
• Touch a Truck at Sunflower Haven Farm ran on a Saturday morning in June and tends to repeat.
• Royal Palm Beach Commons Park concert series continues into August, with the VAM Band scheduled for August 7 from 7 to 9 p.m. at the amphitheater. It is a ten-minute drive from most Groves properties.
• La Petite Cheval Farm continues its youth riding program through the summer, one of the few equestrian instruction operations in town that does not go dark during off-season.

The pattern here is that the events that survive July are the ones tied to working farms, working stables and working municipal parks, not the ones tied to seasonal ticketed audiences.

What returns, and roughly when

For the resident planning around next season rather than this weekend:

That distribution is the actual answer to "what is there to do in the Groves in July." Roughly half of the winter-branded amenity list is dark. The half that is open is the half that residents built the place around before it became a show-season address.

The takeaway for anyone rebuilding a summer routine

The Groves runs on two calendars stacked on top of each other. The visible one belongs to the show-circuit season, the chef dinners and the sunflower photos. The underlying one belongs to the growers, the ranchers, the riding instructors and the road crews, and it runs on twelve months. Summer is the season when only the second one is active, which is a feature if you already live here. The town is quieter, the produce is at its most interesting, and the paving list is finally moving.

If you are thinking about how any of this shapes the market for equestrian property, farm land, or a seasonal rental in this specific corner of Palm Beach County, Martha's Properties works this map year-round. Reach out to request private listing access and a consultation tailored to how the Groves actually lives, not how the winter brochures describe it.