Pick Your Own in Arizona

Arizona fills 3 of the six crops on this list: peaches, apples and pumpkins. The census could not find enough of the rest to build a window from, and the real numbers are further down this page. Frost typically clears the state around February 25 and the first fall freeze typically arrives around November 15, giving about 250 frost free days. That is the clock the fruit runs on.

Frost risk ends in March. Strawberries start in April, peaches carry most of the summer, and by the time the northern states are picking their first berries the Georgia peach crop is already halfway through.

Arizona clears frost in late February like the Gulf states, but its fruit is grown at elevation rather than in the desert, on the Mogollon Rim and around Willcox. The band is right for the timing and wrong for the picture in your head.

Sharing the band with Arizona: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. A band is wide by design. Within one, two states a few hundred miles apart can genuinely differ by a fortnight, and a single state with real elevation in it differs by more than that inside its own borders.

The two crops that ignore all of this are worth saying again. Arizona's pumpkin patches close on October 31 like everyone else's, because a patch is a Halloween business rather than a harvest. Those dates are the only ones on this site that do not move with the weather at all.

That is why a crop can be missing from this page with a real number behind it rather than a blank. A withheld cell is the census saying the crop exists and is small enough that naming the acreage would identify the farm growing it. Where that happens here, the page shows the farm count and notes that the acreage was withheld.