SeattleWA

Washington puts an apple on its licence plates, which gives visitors entirely the wrong idea about picking near Seattle. The commercial apple country is east of the Cascades around Yakima and Wenatchee, two and a half hours away over a mountain pass. What is inside an easy drive is the wet western side, and the wet western side grows berries.

Blueberries dominate here to a degree no other part of the country matches. Two thirds of the farms within an hour of the city pick nothing else, and the season is long because growers plant early, mid and late varieties in the same field: something is ripe from the end of June to the first week of September. The Green River valley south of Auburn, the Snohomish flats to the north and the peat ground at Mercer Slough all grow them, and Bellevue is unusual among American cities in owning working blueberry fields inside its own limits.

North of the city the Snohomish and Skagit valleys hold the strawberry and raspberry farms. Both are river bottom, both flood, and both are the better for it. Strawberries open in the first week of June and are gone by early July, which is a narrower window than newcomers expect. Raspberries follow through July, and the Tulameen and tayberry varieties grown here are worth the drive because they bruise too easily to ship and you will not find them in a shop.

The orchards west of the mountains exist for a different reason than the ones east of them. They are collections rather than crops: Skipley Farm at Snohomish grows around seven hundred apple varieties and Jones Creek in the Skagit Valley more than eighty, both aimed squarely at people who want a Gravenstein or a Cosmic Crisp they cannot buy anywhere. Picking runs from the middle of August into early November.