Terra Ceia Island, Florida
Four friends, forty acres, and one person’s idea.
A working flower & fruit farm on the island at the foot of the Sunshine Skyway, open Friday through Sunday.
How it started
It was one person’s idea before it was a farm.
Ananda Farm was started by three lifelong friends: Chris Boss, and Coby and Kyleen Hinkle. Between them they had the land, the nerve and one very particular idea about what to do with it.
The idea was Kristy’s. She spent her life on the community side of things, sitting on local nonprofit boards, and what she wanted was a place where people could fall in love with the outdoors again, and where her own children could run free.
Kristy passed in 2022, before any of it was built. The other three built it anyway, and the farm opened to the public in November 2024. Everything here runs downstream of what she pictured.
Ananda is a Sanskrit word. It means happiness of the deepest kind, one of the highest states of being. That is a great deal to ask of forty acres, and it is still the brief.
The ground itself
Forty acres at the bottom of the Skyway.
The farm sits on Terra Ceia Island, right where the Sunshine Skyway comes down off Tampa Bay. Before it was ours it was a palm nursery, which is why there are still rows of palms standing in the middle of a fruit farm.
People have farmed this island a long time. The first permanent settlers arrived in 1843, and by the 1890s more than a hundred households here were growing citrus, celery and flowers. Longer than that, in truth: there is a shell temple mound a mile down the road that people built two thousand years ago.
Old Florida is a phrase that gets thrown around. On Terra Ceia it is just the road you drive in on.
What is actually in the ground
A working farm, with the weather to prove it.
Tropical fruit, mostly: mango, avocado, dragon fruit, passionfruit, banana and pineapple. Various sunflowers & Florida wildflower in the U-Pick rows.
It has not all gone smoothly. Helene and Milton came through in the autumn of 2024, weeks before we were due to open, and took roughly two thirds of the young mango trees with them. We replanted into high-density pots so that the next storm is less of a total loss.
What We Care About
Grown here, cooked here
Produce out of our own fields into kitchens on the property. What is not ours is sourced as close to home as we can get it.
Room to roam
Forty acres means children can run without being shushed, and there is shade and seating for everyone else.
Local artists, local music
Murals and sculpture by Gulf Coast makers along the paths, and a different local band on the pavilion most weekends.
Three friends, no franchise
Independently owned, with no chain behind us. Every ticket goes back into the fields and the people who work them.
Happiness grows here.
It is on the signs and the merchandise now, but it began as a description of what Kristy wanted rather than a slogan. Come out and see whether it holds up.