Spring is the only season on this menu that has to be described twice. In March, Palm Beach County is still the winter vegetable capital — sweet corn and tomatoes at full tilt, the last strawberries going by. By the end of May the rains have started, the mangoes are in, and the board is tropical. Same season. Two different menus. This is the spring crop calendar month by month, the dishes each half produces, and why the week your date falls in matters more in spring than at any other time of year.
Spring in Palm Beach County — roughly March through May — is a changeover, not a season. The winter vegetable harvest that made this county famous does not stop in March; it runs hard through April and into May. Sweet corn, tomatoes, bell peppers, snap beans, cucumbers and squash are all still coming out of the ground. On top of that, spring adds the crops that belong to it alone: Florida blueberries, watermelon, and jackfruit. Florida is the first state in the country to pick blueberries, sweet corn and watermelon each year — spring here is the front of the national line.
Then, in the last few weeks of May, the year turns over. The dry season ends around April 30, South Florida's rainy season starts around May 15, and the tropical crop switches on — the first Florida mangoes, lychee, and the new avocado harvest. So America's spring board is genuinely two boards: an early-spring version that leans on the vegetable belt and the blueberries, and a late-spring version that starts to look like summer.
If you are booking an event, that is the one thing worth taking away from this page. Spring holds the densest cluster of immovable dates in the year — Easter, Passover, Mother's Day on the second Sunday of May, graduations, the end of the equestrian and snowbird season, Memorial Day weekend — and unlike a wedding, you cannot slide them a week to catch a crop or dodge the weather. Skip to the crop calendar, the spring menu, or what spring means for your event.
Everywhere else, spring is the beginning of the growing year — seedlings, first greens, the promise of what is coming. Here it is the opposite bookend. Spring is the end of our main harvest and the beginning of the tropical one, and the two overlap for about six weeks in the middle. We wrote about why the calendar runs backwards in South Florida on the winter menu page: our limiting factor is heat, humidity and water rather than cold, so the fields are fullest when the rest of the country's are frozen. Spring is where that inverted year hands off to itself.
Three things happen at once, and they do not happen on the same date every year:
1. The vegetable belt runs out its clock. March and April are not a wind-down. Tomatoes, sweet corn, bell peppers, snap beans, cucumbers, squash and the last of the brassicas are all still harvesting, and for several of them March through May is the single biggest production window of the year. What ends first is the cool-weather tail — the lettuces, the celery, and the strawberries, which finish out around March. By late May, rising night temperatures and the returning rain close most of the rest.
2. The crops that are only spring arrive. Florida blueberries run roughly March into May with April as the heart of it, and Florida picks them before anyone else in the country does. Watermelon starts in April and runs into July. Jackfruit peaks March through June. These are not carry-overs from another season — they are the reason a spring board is worth writing separately at all.
3. The weather flips, mid-season. South Florida's dry season ends around April 30 and the National Weather Service marks the start of the rainy season at about May 15, running to mid-October. That means the first ten weeks of spring belong to the dry season and the last three weeks belong to the wet one. A March event and a Memorial Day event are planned under two different sets of assumptions, which is a sentence you cannot write about any other season here.
For a kitchen that actually buys locally, that hand-off is the whole story. It is also why we do not print a fixed spring menu and pretend it holds from March 1 to May 31. It doesn't. The board is honest about which half of spring you are in.
Seasons are ranges, not switches. A cool March, a late first rain, or a hot week in April moves all of this by a week or two — and in a changeover season those two weeks matter more than they do in January. Treat this as the shape of the season, and check the current week against the FDACS crops-in-season calendar, which is the same source we build the board from.
This is the part no other seasonal menu will tell you, and it is the single most useful thing on this page. The same six dishes are on the board all spring, but they are not all at their best at the same time. Find your date below.
Six dishes. This is the same spring board shown on the main menu page, laid out here with the reason each dish exists in these months — and, where it matters, the honest note about when in spring it is actually at its best.
A seasonal menu is a promise about sourcing, not a fixed contract about dishes — that holds all year. What changes in spring is the size of the moving part. In January, an ingredient is either in or out for the month. In April and May, the answer can change inside a fortnight, because two harvests are handing off to each other and neither one checks a calendar first.
So we do one extra thing on spring bookings that we do not need to do in winter: we confirm the board again about two weeks out. Not to renegotiate the price or the plan — to tell you whether the mango is in, whether the blueberries are still worth serving, and whether anything on the sheet you signed is about to be at the wrong end of its window. Almost always the answer is "no change." When it isn't, you hear it with two weeks to think about it rather than on the day.
The substitution rule is the same as every other season: we substitute inside the season, and we never quietly swap a local ingredient for a shipped-in version of itself. That would defeat the entire point of running a rotating board. Any operator who promises you a fixed spring menu in South Florida is either buying from a distributor or about to disappoint you in the third week of May.
Two planning notes that pay off more in spring than at any other time. First, tell us the constraints early — vegetarian counts, allergies, kids' portions. Four of the six spring dishes are vegetarian and one is vegan, which makes spring the easiest season of the year to feed a mixed crowd well, but only if we know the numbers in advance. Second, a shorter menu serves faster. For a graduation party or any event where everybody arrives at once, two mains and one strong vegetarian option will move a line noticeably quicker than all six; the wedding catering guide works through that arithmetic by guest count in detail.
Spring is not the county's busiest event season — winter is — but it is the season with the most immovable dates, and that changes the booking math completely. A wedding can move a weekend. A graduation cannot. Easter and Passover cannot. Mother's Day is the second Sunday in May and always will be. Memorial Day weekend is the last Monday in May. Add the end-of-season departures — the equestrian crowd leaves Wellington and the snowbird season empties out through April — and you get a calendar where a handful of specific Saturdays and Sundays carry most of the demand while the weeks between them are wide open.
The practical version: if your date is one of those fixed ones, book it earlier than the season's overall calm would suggest. If your date is flexible, spring is one of the easiest times of year to get exactly the setup you want.
Four things about a spring date that are genuinely different from a winter one:
On cost: private catering starts at $800 per event, wedding and event packages start at $2,500, a seated farm dinner at The Bell Farm is $150 per guest with a ten-guest minimum, and events at your own venue add a flat $150 travel line within Palm Beach County. There is no seasonal surcharge — the season affects the board and the calendar, not the quote. The cost guide breaks all of it down by guest count.
If your spring plan is a stay rather than an event, the farm side runs on the same calendar: the farm's season page covers what is happening month by month at The Bell Farm, including the March three-night minimum and the end of the Wellington equestrian season.
America is a state-licensed Mobile Food Dispensing Vehicle (MFD1654011) and an FDACS-registered agritourism operation based at The Bell Farm, 16140 Okeechobee Blvd, Loxahatchee, FL 33470. Licensing details go to your venue's file on request.
Sweet corn, tomatoes, bell peppers, snap beans, cucumbers and squash all run hard from March into May, because the winter vegetable harvest does not stop when spring starts. On top of that, spring brings the crops that belong to it alone: Florida blueberries from roughly March into May, watermelon from April, and jackfruit at peak March through June. At the very end of the season the tropical crop switches on — first mangoes, lychee, and the new avocado harvest. FDACS publishes the current list on its Florida Crops in Season calendar, which is the same source we build the board from.
Because two harvests are handing off inside it. South Florida's main growing season runs November into May, so March and April are the end of that harvest, not the start of a new one — and by late May the tropical crop and the rainy season have both arrived. Early spring eats like a very good winter with blueberries added; late spring eats like early summer. Same three months, two different menus, which is why we describe the season in halves rather than as one block.
Six dishes from March through May. Mains and bowls: the Mango Habanero Chicken Wrap, Sweet Corn & Black Bean Tacos, and Avocado Toast — Farm Edition. Sides, drinks and sweets: Guava Lemonade, a Jackfruit BBQ Sandwich, and a Florida Blueberry Hand Pie. Four of the six are vegetarian and the guava lemonade is vegan, which makes spring the easiest season of the year for feeding a mixed crowd from one window.
Roughly March into May, with April as the heart of it. Florida is the first state in the country to pick blueberries each year, which is exactly why a Florida spring menu can carry a blueberry dessert while most of the country is still weeks away from a local berry. It is the shortest window on the spring board — the spring equivalent of the winter board's strawberry shortcake — so if the hand pie matters for your date, say so when you call.
Only at the very end. Florida mango season runs about May through August, so the Mango Habanero Wrap becomes real in the last stretch of May and then carries into the summer board. For a March or April date we will tell you that honestly rather than serve you a mango that flew in from somewhere else — the whole point of a rotating board is that it does not do that. If mango is non-negotiable, aim for late May or later.
Only at the start. Florida strawberries finish out around March, so an early-spring date can still catch the tail of the window and an April one cannot. That single fact is the clearest illustration of why spring gets described in halves here: the same question has a different answer four weeks apart. The full strawberry window is covered on the winter menu page.
March and April are excellent — still inside the dry season, comfortable evenings, and the firmest ground of the year for parking a truck exactly where you want it. Late May is a different proposition: the rainy season starts around May 15, so afternoon storms and real humidity are back and you need the same contingency plan a summer date needs. Both halves work; they just need different planning.
The National Weather Service marks South Florida's rainy season as starting about May 15 and running to mid-October, with the dry season ending around April 30. In practice that means a March or April event is planning for an exception and a late-May event is planning for a likelihood. It does not stop the truck — we serve through weather — but it changes where the service window and the guest queue should sit, and it is worth naming a person who makes the call on the day.
Late — this is spring's biggest practical advantage over winter. After the clocks change in March, sunset in Palm Beach County runs from roughly 7:30 p.m. out to about 8:10 p.m. by the end of May, so a 6 p.m. event is a daylight event throughout and you need far less rented lighting than a December one. The trade is sun and heat on the service line, so put the window and the queue in shade where the site allows it.
Yes, and those are the dates worth booking early — spring's demand sits on a handful of fixed days rather than spread across the season. Mother's Day is the second Sunday in May, graduation weekends follow it, and Memorial Day weekend closes the season. Unlike a wedding, none of those can slide a week, so the calm-looking spring calendar can still be full on the exact Saturday you need. Private catering starts at $800 per event and events at your own venue in Palm Beach County add a flat $150 travel line.
It depends entirely on whether your date can move. For a fixed-date event — a graduation, Mother's Day, Easter or Passover, Memorial Day weekend — book as early as you would a winter Saturday, because everyone in the county wants that same day. For a flexible spring date, spring is one of the easiest stretches of the year to get exactly the setup and placement you want on shorter notice. Call and ask; we will tell you plainly what the calendar looks like.
We substitute inside the season and we tell you before the day rather than on it. Because spring is a changeover, we do one extra thing on spring bookings that winter does not need: we confirm the board again about two weeks out, so you hear about a closing window with time to think rather than at the window. What we never do is quietly replace a local ingredient with a shipped-in version of itself.
Spring is the strongest season on this menu for it. Four of the six dishes are vegetarian — the Sweet Corn & Black Bean Tacos, the Avocado Toast, the Jackfruit BBQ Sandwich and the Blueberry Hand Pie — and the Guava Lemonade is vegan. The jackfruit sandwich in particular is built to be the anchor rather than the afterthought when part of your guest list does not eat meat. Give us the counts when you book and nobody ends up choosing between two sides.
The Bell Farm in Loxahatchee grows for the truck, and the rest of the spring board comes from the Palm Beach County growing region around it — the same vegetable belt that supplies the eastern United States from November into May, plus the Glades farmland west of us at Belle Glade, Pahokee and South Bay. This county grows more fresh sweet corn than any other in the country, which is why the taco is the most local thing on the board.
Yes. America is a state-licensed Mobile Food Dispensing Vehicle (MFD1654011) and an FDACS-registered agritourism operation based at The Bell Farm, 16140 Okeechobee Blvd, Loxahatchee, FL 33470. We can provide licensing details for your venue's file. Call (561) 779-3213 to hold a spring date.