BostonMA

Boston is ringed by farms in every direction, which makes it the easiest city on this site to pick from and the hardest to choose in. Three states sit inside a comfortable drive, so some of the farms below are in New Hampshire and Rhode Island rather than Massachusetts.

West of the city the Nashoba Valley runs through Stow, Harvard and Bolton, and it is orchard country of a particular kind: old farms on glacial hills with deep variety lists rather than commercial monocrops. Doe Orchards marks its trees by name so you can taste your way along a row. Carlson keeps a fifty-year-old blueberry patch alongside twenty apple varieties. North, the Merrimack Valley carries the same pattern up through Andover and across the state line into Hollis and Londonderry, where Sunnycrest publishes its picking windows to the day and Scooter's runs fifteen varieties of organic apple on the honour system with nothing pre-picked at all.

South and on the Cape the soil turns sandy and the crops turn to berries. Cape Cod blueberry seasons are short and sharp, sometimes only a few weeks, and the farms there say so rather than pretending otherwise. An hour south west, the Rhode Island orchards around Scituate and Smithfield stretch the apple season into November with late varieties bred to store through winter.

Strawberries here open in June, later than New York and much later than the south, and they are gone in three or four weeks. Apples run from the middle of August to November and are what most people mean when they say picking. What New England does better than anywhere else on this site is the shoulder: raspberries planted for two crops, one in July and another from Labor Day until the frost, so there is fruit worth driving to in late September when everywhere else has finished.