{"id":219097,"date":"2026-04-04T23:49:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T23:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/219097\/"},"modified":"2026-04-04T23:49:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T23:49:07","slug":"keel-farms-kicks-off-17th-annual-blueberry-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/219097\/","title":{"rendered":"Keel Farms kicks off 17th annual Blueberry Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

PLANT CITY, Fla. \u2014\u00a0For the 17th year, Keel Farms in Plant City is opening up for its annual Blueberry Festival<\/a>, celebrating agriculture in Hillsborough County.<\/p>\n

What You Need To Know<\/p>\n

Keel Farms’ annual Blueberry Festival kicked off this weekend
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The cold snap has killed about 5% of the blueberry crop, but the farm expects the harvest to start in the next week
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The festival is open weekends in April<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s cold snap, owners say, is delaying a full bloom.<\/p>\n

While the cold only killed about 5% of his crop, Clay Keel, president of Keel Farms, says the adverse weather, which got as low as 23 degrees, is impacting harvest.<\/p>\n

\u201cLuckily for us, our varieties are a little bit later\u2014meaning they bloom a bit later in the season\u2014and we were still before the bloom. And blueberries are pretty tough. They can take all the\u00a0way down to 15 degrees as long as there\u2019s no bloom or berry yet,\u201d said Keel.<\/p>\n

That means no picking over Easter weekend, but in the next week, Keel says his 15-acre farm should be ready to pick.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s my first festival, but being that I\u2019m country grown, I absolutely love it, especially when they said we were able to feed the animals and taste fresh blueberries,\u201d Lafe Eastman, a festival attendee, said.<\/p>\n

The farm, which has been around since the 80s, is expecting as many as 10,000 people per weekend in April. Keel is looking for 70-degree overnight lows, that, he says, is the sweet spot for harvest.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe blueberries are ready when they\u2019re ready, right? So it\u2019s hard to plan a festival around when they\u2019re ready,\u201d said Keel. \u201cIt\u2019s actually really sustainable. The plants last and produce fruit really well for almost a decade, so these plants are six to seven years old.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tart berries won\u2019t stop the festival. Keel Farms instead planted 3,000 Easter eggs for the whole family to enjoy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe kids love hunting for eggs. We didn\u2019t have plans for Easter so it was a perfect fit. Beautiful weather, kids had fun,\u201d Mike Slaven, who is visiting from New York, said.<\/p>\n

Keel Farms will be closed for Easter Sunday, but will reopen every weekend in April from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The event is free, but parking will cost $10 per vehicle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PLANT CITY, Fla. \u2014\u00a0For the 17th year, Keel Farms in Plant City is opening up for its annual…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":219098,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[4323,4092,276,115,135,137,136,106,835],"class_list":{"0":"post-219097","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tampa","8":"tag-andy-cole","9":"tag-app-things-to-do","10":"tag-hillsborough-county","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-tampa","13":"tag-tampa-headlines","14":"tag-tampa-news","15":"tag-things-to-do","16":"tag-vod"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219097\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}