For nearly 50 years, thousands of blueberries have bloomed at the Gainesville farm located at 8910 E County Road 225 for spring u-pick seasons. The farm operated as Santa Fe Blueberries for decades and Santa Fe River Farms for the past three blueberry seasons.

Now under the name River & Root Farm, new owners Rebecca Fox and David Tuthill are gearing up for a blueberry u-pick season as the business opened on Earth Day, April 22, and will continue picking until the berries stop blooming around June.

River & Root will be open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, with other times available by appointment. Farm entry is $5 for all attendees over two years old. U-pick blueberries are $7 per pound and pre-picked blueberries are $9 per pound.

River & Root also has a limited number of $30 memberships that include no entry fees during the berry season and a member-only event at the season’s end.

Since Fox and Tuthill bought and moved to the farm in July 2025, they’ve had to prepare for their first harvest season through a historic freeze and now a historic drought that has tested the resilience of the new farmers and their crops.

But with opening day right around the corner, the couple is looking forward to bringing fresh fruit to North Central Florida as they work to preserve a slice of old Florida through their labor of love for the land and each other at River & Root.

“We’re now the third owner,” said Fox, wearing a “No farms, no food” hat. “It’s really an honor to continue that lineage and the history and the legacy of some land that has built a relationship with the community, too.”

The St. Petersburg couple started looking for farmland in order to counteract development by highlighting and protecting Florida’s natural resources in a way that shows people can also enjoy them.

They said they wanted the Alachua County area because of agricultural support systems offered through its local government and organizations. When they toured the 30-acre River & Root property, it was love at first sight.

“This was maybe the second or third place that we visited, and the first time we saw it, I remember after we were done, it was just this silence. We sort of knew,” Fox said. “Then our brains were like, how do we make this work?”

In addition to the 5.4 acres of blueberry bushes and u-pick store infrastructure already built, the property boasts a “food forest,” an ecosystem of plants grown to symbiotically benefit each crop in the forest, as well as a bamboo forest and trails winding along the Santa Fe River at the back of the property.

The couple said conservation surrounding River & Root will keep it sheltered from development, as Carson Springs Wildlife Conservation Foundation, Alachua Conservation Trust and the Suwannee River Water Management District own the neighboring properties.

Fox and Tuthill said the drought has exposed more of the area’s history as concrete railroad pylons left over from a spur on the Pensacola to Jacksonville route protrude above the river’s low levels.

One of Fox’s favorite activities along the riverbank dotted with rain lilies is to sift through the sand where she finds shark teeth. The River & Root name means to honor the history of the river, the land, the root of people who stewarded it before and those Fox and Tuthill want to plant for generations to come.

“We’re standing on the shoulders of giants and have the privilege to put these pieces together and be able to represent what we’re about through our values and through our lifestyle,” Fox said. “We hope that creates good food and also creates an authentic story.”

Fox and Tuthill committed their first year as farmers to throwing off perfectionism and learning, with the land’s previous owners, local farmers, the plants themselves and even the pests as their teachers.

The couple is committed to growing crops without chemicals and working towards an organic certification and regenerative agritourism. Instead of immediately exterminating pests, they want to learn about the ecosystem of their farm and grow a permaculture that can sustain it all naturally.

Then, there came the freeze. Temperatures dipped below 30 degrees for days on end as this winter brought some of the lowest temperatures in Gainesville’s history. Fox said they had to trust the plants would know what to do.

The couple also used a counterintuitive overhead watering technique to help protect them. When the temperature dropped, they watered the plants. As the water changed from liquid to ice, the thermal energy cultivated a microclimate keeping temperatures just above freezing.

“I woke up the next morning, and I was crestfallen because I thought I had destroyed them,” Tuthill said. “It’s like no Floridian has ever seen. Our neighbor, Shannon, down the street, she would always come over because she’d never seen snow.”

It worked. Even among the dead branches lost to the freeze, Fox and Tuthill got to taste the fruit of new life blooming in their classroom this month.

“Patience,” Fox said about what she learned. “They keep teaching us about the balance between man, nature as wild, and these plants as cultivated.”

“It’s resilience, and it’s appreciating that a season will come and a season will go,” Tuthill said. “We will learn from that season, and we will have it again the next season, and we’ll have much more knowledge and power and ability from what we went through.”

Even in their first season, Fox and Tuthill are already planning for the future. They hope to partner with the county and other organizations to help get their product into the community, farm their bamboo and build Airbnb lodging for rural getaways and events.

Whatever comes next, the couple said they intend for their commitment to the farm to be as lifelong as the one they’re going to make to each other.

“We’ll be able to start hosting events and start with our own wedding,” Fox said. “This farm is a love story between us, and also really a representation of the ongoing relationship between food and farming and health; physical health, mental health, health of the earth and the land.”

Follow River & Root Farm on Facebook for more updates on their blueberry picking season.