Pick Your Own in Minnesota
5 of the six crops on this list clear the census threshold in Minnesota, and the largest is Christmas trees at 7,127 acres over 243 farms in the 2022 Census of Agriculture. The census counted too little peaches to build a window from, and each is named with its numbers below. Frost typically clears Minnesota around May 14, 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 Minnesota windows right now, which is a statement about the calendar and not about any farmWhat falls inside its window in Minnesota today
Great Lakes, Northeast and Upper Plains band, 2022 census coverageApples
September 1 to October 31
Inside its typical window today
Harvest bandPumpkins
September 12 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 5 to July 10
Typically opens in about 229 days
Harvest bandBlueberries
July 1 to August 31
Typically opens in about 255 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.
Minnesota’s picking year
Minnesota fills 5 of the six crops on this list: strawberries, blueberries, 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 14 and the first fall freeze typically arrives around September 26, giving about 135 frost free days. That is the clock the fruit runs on.
Every Minnesota window, with the caveat attached
The block below carries every Minnesota 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
- Peaches, no season. The 2022 Census of Agriculture counted 1 acres over 5 farms in Minnesota, under the line this site uses for a crop somebody could plausibly drive to, so there is no window for it here.
Minnesota is in the Great Lakes, Northeast and Upper Plains band
The classic June strawberry, July blueberry, September apple calendar. Frost clears in the first fortnight of May and everything follows in order from there.
Minnesota clears frost on May 14, later than its band, but the orchard and berry ground is the Mississippi bluff country and the Twin Cities metro, both of which run with Wisconsin rather than with the Red River valley.
Sharing the band with Minnesota: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. 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. Minnesota'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 Minnesota 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.
Minnesota pick your own FAQ
The rest of the Minnesota 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