Pick Your Own: When Each Crop Is Typically Ready

Which crops a state page carries is not a judgement call. It comes from the USDA 2022 Census of Agriculture: a crop earns a row when the census counted at least 10 farms growing it and either at least 10 acres or a withheld acreage cell. Both halves matter. Acres alone would let one large commercial block stand in for an industry a visitor could reach; farms alone would let a few dozen households with a raised bed each stand in for a season.

Strawberries. The first pick of the year almost everywhere, and the shortest. A strawberry field gives three to five weeks and then it is done, which is why a strawberry weekend gets planned and an apple weekend gets improvised. Strawberries fruit on the spring that just happened, so the window tracks how fast the ground warmed. A cold April pushes it back a fortnight and a warm one pulls it forward.

Blueberries. The longest picking window of the six. A planting of early, mid and late highbush varieties can hold a farm open for two months, so blueberries forgive a missed weekend in a way strawberries never do. Cultivated highbush blueberries ripen over weeks rather than days, and growers plant varieties that deliberately stagger. The window is wide because the crop is wide.

Peaches. The crop most likely to simply not happen. Peaches bloom early, and a hard freeze on an open blossom takes the whole year rather than delaying it. In a bad spring a state can lose most of its crop in one night. Peach bloom comes weeks before the last frost risk passes, so the window below describes a normal year. It cannot describe a year with a February warm spell followed by a March freeze, and those years happen.

Apples. The one crop with bearing acres in all fifty states, and the longest u-pick season of the tree fruits. Early varieties start in high summer and late ones hang until the first real freeze. Apple harvest runs by variety rather than by date. The window below spans the early varieties through the late ones, so a farm inside it may still be picking only two or three of the dozen kinds it grows.

Pumpkins. Not really a harvest window at all. A pumpkin patch is a Halloween business, and it closes on October 31 in Georgia and in Maine alike whatever the weather did. Pumpkins are cut and left on the vine or on pallets, so the patch date is set by the holiday rather than by ripeness. The only thing weather moves is the opening: the north opens earlier because the vines finish earlier.

Christmas trees. The only window on this page that is identical in every state that has one. Cut your own opens the Friday after Thanksgiving and the good trees are gone by the second weekend of December. A Christmas tree took eight to ten years to reach cutting height, so nothing about the current season moves the date. Thanksgiving moves, which is why the opening below is computed from the fourth Thursday of November rather than typed in.

Every state has a page, because every state grows something on this list. What differs is how many of the six it fills. 37 states carry all six. The thinnest are North Dakota with 2, Wyoming with 2 and Alaska with 2, and those pages are more interesting than the full ones: they say which crops the census could not find and what the real numbers were.