Pick Your Own in Montana
4 of the six crops on this list clear the census threshold in Montana, and the largest is Christmas trees at 452 acres over 39 farms in the 2022 Census of Agriculture. The census counted too little strawberries and blueberries to build a window from, and each is named with its numbers below. Frost typically clears Montana around May 20, 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 Montana windows right now, which is a statement about the calendar and not about any farmWhat falls inside its window in Montana 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 setPeaches
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.
Montana’s picking year
Montana fills 4 of the six crops on this list: 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 20 and the first fall freeze typically arrives around September 22, giving about 125 frost free days. That is the clock the fruit runs on.
Every Montana window, with the caveat attached
The block below carries every Montana 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
- Strawberries, no season. The 2022 Census of Agriculture counted 8 acres over 35 farms in Montana, under the line this site uses for a crop somebody could plausibly drive to, so there is no window for it here.
- Blueberries, no season. The 2022 Census of Agriculture counted 7 acres over 19 farms in Montana, under the line this site uses for a crop somebody could plausibly drive to, so there is no window for it here.
Montana 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.
Montana's median last spring frost is May 20 and its median first fall freeze is September 22, about 125 frost free days, which places it in this band without argument. USDA hardiness zones here run 3a to 6a.
Sharing the band with Montana: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, 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. Montana'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 Montana 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.
Montana pick your own FAQ
The rest of the Montana 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