PortlandOR

Portland is unusually well placed for picking, because it sits between two growing areas that ripen at different times. That turns a short season into a long one: something is worth driving to from June through late October.

The Willamette Valley starts south and west of the city, on deep silt loam left by the Missoula floods. It is berry country, and the reason Oregon grows more blackberries than anywhere else in the country. Strawberries come first in June, and the June-bearing varieties grown here are picked ripe and eaten within days rather than shipped, which is why they taste nothing like the ones in a supermarket. Blueberries follow through July and August, and marionberries, a blackberry bred at Oregon State and named for the county, arrive in the middle of July and last about three weeks.

East of the city the Columbia River Gorge climbs toward the Hood River Valley, where the orchards sit between 500 and 1,500 feet with Mount Hood behind them. The elevation slows everything down, so the fruit ripens later and holds its acidity: cherries in late June, peaches through August, then pears and apples into October. Hood River grows more winter pears than anywhere else in the United States, and the Anjou and Bosc that show up in shops in January were picked here in the autumn.

Closer in, Sauvie Island sits ten miles from downtown where the Willamette meets the Columbia. It is flat, it floods, and the soil is the better for it. Berries in summer, and from late September the pumpkin patches and corn mazes that are most Portlanders' first memory of a farm.