Paying seven dollars for a tiny clamshell of mediocre berries at the supermarket seems all the more obscene when you think about how many bushes are just sitting there, sagging with vine-ripened berries waiting to be picked, probably not 20 minutes away.
It’s perhaps the most Central Valley thing in the world to take for granted the stunning bounty of the Central Valley. So, let this be your reminder: people grow delicious berries around here. You can pick them yourself and make an outing of it, and they generally taste much better than the ones from the supermarket, trucked in from hours away. Even better, because Fresno is still Fresno, you probably won’t pay the “yuppie tax” that you might at the kinds of Instagram-ready U-pick farms outside a major metropolis.
In fact, when I arrived at Fresno Blueberry Farm & Nursery in southwest Fresno – the last remaining U-Pick blueberry operation in Fresno proper since Sumner Peck/River Ranch closed for the San Joaquin Valley river restoration project earlier this year – I wasn’t even sure I was in the right place. It was just a private driveway on a country road. I had to pull all the way in before I could even see the U-Pick sign. Only the farmer coming out of his house to greet us confirmed that we were in the right place. No yuppies around here, no sirree.
Still, when a friend asked about our U-Pick excursion later, he scoffed a little. “Ah, they’re just getting free labor.”
While that’s undoubtedly true, I filled three paint buckets full of perfectly ripe blackberries, blueberries, and strawberries, and the whole haul cost me $23 dollars. I certainly wouldn’t want to do it as a job, but as a way to get some very good berries (much sweeter than the ones from the store), the economics pencil out.
“U-pick is much better because I don’t have any full-time people that work for me,” Bill Grady, the aforementioned farmer of Fresno Blueberry Farm & Nursery, tells me.
He acknowledges, by the way, that “Blueberry Farm” might be a bit of a misnomer, as his blackberry and strawberry hauls this year far outstrip his blueberries. In fact his best crop, he says, is probably black-eyed peas. Still, everything must go (and I did find plenty of blueberries).
“I have people come in, help me clean up all the rows,” Grady says. “Anything that produces berries, that all has to come off at the end of the season and new stuff goes up.”
So he doesn’t exactly deny the “free labor” allegations. But it’s largely up to the consumer. You can pay $7 a pound for they-pick blackberries, and $5 a pound if you pick them yourself.
“I hire people to pick [in addition to the U-Pick operation], but my profits just go, because of the labor cost. I pay $18 an hour to pick for anybody that works for me. One guy, $20 an hour, but he died a couple weeks ago,” Grady says. “He was the guy that shot that cop.”
It wasn’t the story I was expecting to hear astride a baby blue, postcard-ready farmhouse with a wrap-around porch among rows of gently swaying berry bushes. Again, that’s part of the Fresno charm: people around here tend not to put on airs, and Grady is no exception.
“He’d been in the joint – was on parole when we first met him when we first moved out here. He worked for several people in the area. He was from Compton or Watts. I think the farm was just his escape from the jungle, it made him feel like a human. So we paid him well. There’s several people around here that liked his work. He had a key to my house.”
It’s not hard to see why Grady’s farm might’ve felt like an escape. My audio recorder captures the sounds of birds chirping overhead, a light breeze blowing through the leaves of eucalyptus trees as we stand in neat furrows of blackberries, blueberries, and strawberries out back, with raised planters of tomato vines crawling up cages. Grady is fixing the branch of a peach tree while we chat (it cracked from the weight of the fruit).
The farm is an escape for Grady too. It’s been open since 2019, around the time he retired as a union plumber working in San Francisco.
“My last seven years, I’d come home on the weekends, Friday nights, get out of the truck and just start working,” he says.
Which isn’t to say, of course, that the farming has been stress-free.
“Everything came 20 days early this year,” Grady says, noting that peak season for blueberries is in late April. “That’s what the other growers are telling me too. It got hot, and then it sent it into blossom. Everything. Boysenberries? Just trashed. I had a beautiful crop, but then that last heat wave came through a hundred degrees, and man, boysenberries can’t tolerate that. That’s probably our hardest crop to grow, the most labor intensive. I’ve lost my boysenberries two years in a row. I’m pulling them out. Maybe in a couple weeks it’s going to be corn. I’d rather grow corn and watermelons.”
Hey, no one said escapes don’t require work.
U-pick, from the consumer side, isn’t much different. Drive out to a farm, scuff the dirt a little, sweat a lot, and by the end of an outing, hopefully you’ll have hands covered in berry juice and a week or two’s supply of fresh fruit. No one would tell you it’s easier than buying them from the grocery store, but it’s certainly nicer.
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More U-Pick blueberry and blackberry farms
Fresno
Fresno Blueberry Ranch & Nursery
2307 N. Hayes Ave.
559.408.8765
Hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Mondays, by appointment only.
Blackberries: $5 a pound U-Pick, $7 a pound they pick.
Blueberries: $5 a pound.
Strawberries: $2 a pound U-Pick, $3 a pound they pick.
Plus Peaches, plums, nectarines, tomatoes, squash & zucchini, okra, and black-eyed peas.
Accepts cash, Zelle, and Cashapp.
Hanford
Rancho Notso Grande
5051 12th Ave, Hanford
559.269.1162
Tuesday – Saturday, 8 am – 6 pm. (closed Sunday and Monday).
Apricots, blackberries, blueberries, boysenberries, flowers, nectarines, olallieberries, other berries, peaches, pecans, raspberries, tayberries, walnuts, farm made wine, jams, frozen cobblers and prepicked produce.
$7.50 admission, plus fruit price.
Genesis Organic Farm
7595 Central Valley Hwy, Hanford
Hours: By appointment only. 559.410.3607
Cherries, Blackberries, Peaches, Apricots, Apriums, Apples, Fuyu Persimmons and Pluots. (No blueberries).
Woodlake
Big L Ranch
20899 Avenue 322, Woodlake
559.280.2767
Wednesdays: 6 – 9 am; 2 – 8 pm
Thursdays: 2 – 8 pm
Fridays: 2 – 8 pm
Saturdays: 8 am – 2 pm; 5 – 8:30 pm
Sundays: 8 am – 2 pm
(Closed Monday and Tuesday)
Atwater
Valenta Blueberry Farm
3689 Bert Crane Rd, Atwater
Monday – Saturday, 9 am – 1 pm.
Blueberries
