In Collier County, local conservative firebrand farmer and grocery store owner Alfie Oakes is sanguine about Hurricane Milton’s impact on the region.
He held a hurricane party for all comers at his flagship store, Seed to Table, that ran Tuesday night until 1 a.m. Wednesday, offering hurricane specials on food and drink and “the energy was amazing.”
“We had one of the busiest food and bar sales nights we’ve ever had in the history of Seed to Table,” Oakes said. “It was unbelievable.”
It was like the day before Thanksgiving
That carried through yesterday at the grocery store, where people showed up to stock up before Milton made landfall. Oakes likened it to the day before Thanksgiving, which is traditionally one of the biggest days of the year for grocery store sales.
He says Seed to Table will open at noon Thursday, as well.
Milton made landfall around 8:30 p.m. last night in Siesta Key, sending a high of roughly 6 feet of storm surge through Naples. Before that, however, Milton dumped inches and inches of rain on Southwest Florida ― and that rainfall, Oakes said, was something he had to prepare for.
Oakes is a farmer, as well as a grocer, and has crops in the ground right now, from Arcadia to Punta Gorda to Immokalee. He has about 3,000 acres planted, he said, most in Immokalee, made up of tomatoes, watermelons, strawberries and green peppers.
He expects to see some over-saturation of his crops, given the rain Milton poured down.
Strawberries, in particular, are very sensitive to rain and need their water levels just right to ripen, rather than rot in the field.
“We’ll get knocked back a little on that, but that’s just farming,” Oakes said.
In preparation for Milton, Oakes actually sent farmworkers out into the field to pick as many watermelons as feasible over the last few days. According to Oakes, they picked almost 4 million pounds of watermelons before the storm.
“We picked some of them on the earlier side just to get them out of the field so we didn’t have to float them out of there,” Oakes joked. “That’s the earliest we’ve ever harvested watermelons.
“All in all, we’ll take it,” he said. “There’s another one behind it. You think you’ve dodged a bullet from one, but there’s another one right behind it.”
This article originally appeared on Naples Daily News: Collier grocer Alfie Oakes, hopeful about Hurricane Milton’s impact
