Pick Your Own in Virginia
All six crops on this list have commercial acreage in Virginia, and the largest is apples at 9,825 acres over 541 farms in the 2022 Census of Agriculture. Frost typically clears Virginia around April 15, 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 Virginia windows right now, which is a statement about the calendar and not about any farmWhat falls inside its window in Virginia today
Upper South and Mid Atlantic band, 2022 census coverageApples
August 10 to November 5
Inside its typical window today
Harvest bandPumpkins
September 20 to October 31
Inside its typical window today
Calendar setChristmas trees
November 27 to December 23
Typically opens in about 39 days
Calendar setStrawberries
April 20 to June 10
Typically opens in about 183 days
Harvest bandBlueberries
June 1 to July 31
Typically opens in about 225 days
Harvest bandPeaches
June 15 to September 10
Typically opens in about 239 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.
Virginia’s picking year
Virginia fills all six crops on this list, which puts it in a minority of states, and the bars above run from the first berries of the spring to the last tree cut before Christmas. Frost typically clears the state around April 15 and the first fall freeze typically arrives around October 25, giving about 190 frost free days. That is the clock the fruit runs on.
Every Virginia window, with the caveat attached
The block below carries every Virginia window, whose window each one is, what the census counted and where to look for a farm, with the weather caveat alongside.
Virginia is in the Upper South and Mid Atlantic band
The longest fruit calendar in the country. Frost clears in early April, strawberries follow within a fortnight, and apples hang into early November. Six crops fit comfortably.
Virginia's median last spring frost is April 15 and its median first fall freeze is October 25, about 190 frost free days, which places it in this band without argument. USDA hardiness zones here run 5b to 8a.
Sharing the band with Virginia: Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas and Oklahoma. 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. Virginia'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 Virginia 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.
Virginia pick your own FAQ
The rest of the Virginia 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