Pick Your Own in Colorado
5 of the six crops on this list clear the census threshold in Colorado, and the largest is pumpkins at 3,020 acres over 254 farms in the 2022 Census of Agriculture. The census counted too little blueberries to build a window from, and each is named with its numbers below. Frost typically clears Colorado around May 12, which is the clock everything except the pumpkin patch and the Christmas tree lot runs on. Every window below is a typical range rather than a report.
Apples and pumpkins are all inside their typical Colorado windows right now, which is a statement about the calendar and not about any farmWhat falls inside its window in Colorado today
Northern New England, Northern Rockies and Alaska band, 2022 census coverageApples
September 5 to October 25
Inside its typical window today
Harvest bandPumpkins
September 10 to October 31
Inside its typical window today
Calendar setChristmas trees
November 27 to December 23
Typically opens in about 39 days
Calendar setStrawberries
June 15 to July 25
Typically opens in about 239 days
Harvest bandPeaches
August 1 to September 15
Typically opens in about 286 days
Harvest band“Inside its typical window” is arithmetic on a calendar. Whether the fruit has ripened and whether a farm near you is picking on a given day is published by the farm.
Colorado’s picking year
Colorado fills 5 of the six crops on this list: strawberries, peaches, apples, pumpkins and Christmas trees. 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 May 12 and the first fall freeze typically arrives around October 2, giving about 150 frost free days. That is the clock the fruit runs on.
Every Colorado window, with the caveat attached
The block below carries every Colorado window, whose window each one is, what the census counted and where to look for a farm, with the weather caveat alongside.
Crops below the census threshold
- Blueberries, no season. The 2022 Census of Agriculture counted 5 farms, with the acreage withheld to avoid identifying an individual operation in Colorado, under the line this site uses for a crop somebody could plausibly drive to, so there is no window for it here.
Colorado is in the Northern New England, Northern Rockies and Alaska band
The shortest and latest calendar. Frost can hold into the third week of May, strawberries wait for late June, and the apple season is over before Halloween in most years.
Colorado clears frost on May 12 statewide, but the peach ground is the Grand Valley and the North Fork on the Western Slope, which is warmer and earlier than the statewide figure implies. The band is a compromise and the peach window is the widest on the page because of it.
Sharing the band with Colorado: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada and Alaska. 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 frost dates above are medians for representative stations in the state’s populated core, which means half of all years are later than the date shown. A valley floor frosts earlier than the hillside above it and a lakeshore later than the town ten miles inland, so the number places a state against other states rather than a farm against its own calendar. Frost dates by state and city carries the detail, including the early and late brackets.
Summarised from NOAA 1991 to 2020 climate normals, as carried by this site's frost vertical in our own words.
The two crops that ignore all of this are worth saying again. Colorado's pumpkin patches close on October 31 like everyone else's, because a patch is a Halloween business rather than a harvest. Cut your own Christmas trees open the Friday after Thanksgiving, the same fortnight in Colorado as in Georgia and in Maine, because a tree that took nine years to reach cutting height does not care what this spring did. Those dates are the only ones on this site that do not move with the weather at all.
USDA NASS, 2022 Census of Agriculture, Appendix A, Disclosure Review“NASS is obligated to withhold, under Title 7, U.S. Code, any total that would reveal an individual’s information or allow it to be closely estimated by the public.”
USDA NASS, 2022 Census of Agriculture, Appendix A, Disclosure Review“Farm counts are not considered sensitive and are not subject to disclosure controls.”
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.
Colorado pick your own FAQ
The rest of the Colorado food calendar
Picking windows in nearby states
Acreage and farm counts are USDA NASS’s, from the 2022 Census of Agriculture, a US Government work in the public domain, pulled from the Quick Stats bulk census file on 2026-09-04. Frost medians are NOAA 1991 to 2020 normals for representative stations. Florida’s harvest windows are the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services’ own; every other window on this site is ours, placed by hand into a harvest band and printed next to the state’s frost date so it can be checked. Picking windows in every state