AtlantaGA

Everything happens earlier here. Strawberries open in the middle of April, six weeks before Portland and two months before Boston, and they are finished by the first week of June. Blueberries start in late May. By the time the northern orchards are getting going, Georgia is most of the way through its summer fruit and moving on to muscadines.

Two growing areas sit inside the same drive and they are not on the same clock. North Georgia around Ellijay and Blue Ridge is apple country at two thousand feet, cool enough to need a proper autumn, and its season looks like New England: picking from late August through October, cider doughnuts, hayrides, corn mazes. Ellijay calls itself the apple capital of Georgia and has four large pick-your-own orchards inside ten miles of each other. Everything south and east of the city is a different climate entirely: peaches from May, rabbiteye blueberries from late May, blackberries in June.

Rabbiteye is worth knowing about. It is the southern blueberry, a different species from the northern highbush grown in Michigan and Washington, with a tougher skin and a later, longer season, and it is what almost every Georgia blueberry farm grows. It handles heat that would kill a highbush bush outright.

The crop that belongs to this region more than any other is the muscadine. It is America's native grape, grown nowhere in the north, and it is picked one berry at a time rather than in bunches because the fruit on a single cluster ripens unevenly. The season runs from late August to the first frost, with September and October the months worth going for. Nothing else on this site tastes remotely like it.