I have always said I want to retire to mine. I don’t need a lot of income because I will have some saved plus social security, if it still exists in 6 years. Plus growing fruit and a garden saves on food bills and is a great way to spend time, reducing the need for hobbies and entertainment.
No way will I do a farmers market because I’m not going to haul hundreds of pounds of apples around, especially to hear people say they’re too small or too nubby or have funny spots on them. Maybe a CSA plus selling to a farm to table restaurant. Maybe an AirBnb with picking, canning, a small nursery, and classes. What do you all do?
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I’m on the verge of wanting to create a small u-pick but people be testing me though 
If not, i do plan on trying to market to the small grocery stores to start off until I have enough to supply maybe 1 big store. I know sometimes you can supply to places like Safeway or even Winco with just a contract for 1 store but there’s a lot that goes into it and you have to have enough supply to begin.
I think if you have something unique enough, you should at least try the farmer’s market once or so.
If you have some friends with businesses in the food industry, you can also hash it out with them as a supplier for produce. I’ve made plans for this with my friend and her dog food business. I had a friend who owns a restaurant as well but we haven’t spoken in years since i denied a marriage proposition for citizenship 
that was fun. I may make myself known again in the future at the restaurant cause his mom likes me but it’s kind of far.
I think the biggest hurdle in all of this, at least for me, is that I feel bad making my friends and family pay for things… but like, i put a lot of time, effort, money and painful days growing everything. 
so this is biggest mental hurdle for myself.
I’m going to try the farmer’s market where I’m at eventually. If not, at least i know i would have made some contacts.
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I’ve recently randomly encountered a few people talking to grocery store owners about selling their products and I imagine that’ll be me in their shoes eventually.
I know in Colorado Springs, there was a guy who loved growing things hydroponically and he managed to get a contract with the Zoo to grow the veggies for some of the animals which was pretty cool. He has a cool trailer that’s setup next to the ice cream trailer at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. I’m a fatty so of course i know where it’s located, especially if by an ice cream stand
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This is the greatest benefit of all.
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@Melon I’m also exploring ideas for a upick, especially for berries. Fortunately since I’m already self employed I’ve got a little more freedom to try things out on a smaller scale before pushing it too big. At the moment focus #1 is trying out small plantings of different varieties to see what grows well for me and has good fruit. I’m hoping to do minimal or no spray. My family and I love fresh fruit, so I figure at this stage, worst case scenario we have a lot of healthy fresh fruit to feed the kids lol. I’m not planning to spend tens of thousands of dollars without a better plan, but if it’s something I already enjoy, I figured why not put in a few test plantings and see what happens.
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I find myself spraying twice a year but it’s dormant oil during the winter and early spring. Other than that, I have too much to want to spray. I’ve been looking into plants that attract wasps because throughout the years, they’ve been my best pest control. At the end of the season, i do see them taking off my old and very late ripened blueberries but I take it as they’ve earned it. They don’t mess with my strawberries nor do they go after my raspberries or anything else so far but they seem to love cleaning up the blueberries for me. I have 5 mature blueberry plants and over 20 small ones 
I like being able to rinse and eat vs rinse, wash, rinse, eat. Sometimes i don’t do either and eat as i go.
I hyper focused on getting fig cuttings cause I’ve FINALLY got them right I feel like so now I have over 100 starts going.
I managed 1 orange last year and now i have 15+ citrus trees… my thing would be to be the first tropical, fig, and berry u-pick.
I don’t work so i have a lot of time on my hands. I’ve been reading on private u-picks where people can schedule and such and it sounds like a better option overall vs a public one since this will be at my residence. Or maybe have it as female only since it’s just me and the kids mostly. I really want to share my stuff but at the same time, really want to limit my exposer to unnecessary risks.
I do love growing things just to grow them.
I think if anything, you have to love it first before letting it go public. If you don’t already love it then it’ll feel like a choir once other people start getting involved.
There’s so many routes to go with and I’m not sure about your experiences but i have major trust issues after my previous business ventures. Because of that, I’m leery of everyone
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Everything I earn is from fruit and veg growing. We have 2 acres of apples, 1.5 of pears, 2 soon to be 3 acres of peaches, we used to have 10 acres of cherries as well, but they became problematic because they were very large trees and insurance wouldn’t cover u pick on ladders anymore, but I’m putting in a new acre next year that will be u pick height. I would recommend against apples unless you’re willing to put a lot into it. We have 2 acres of apples, which satisfies a lot of our demand, but we’ll have another acre coming on in a couple years that will be mostly u pick. Apples are our biggest money maker, but also the biggest expense. They are the easiest to grow of our fruits, but take a ton of labor and the most sprays. Apples are also very common due to the ease of growing.
Depending on where you are, I would recommend stone fruit or berries. I’m in Western Oregon, so we’re pretty lucky in being able to grow almost any temperate fruit. Our farm stand is also on the way to a the most popular hiking spot in town so we always have a lot of traffic. Berries are the quickest to produce, but also will have a lot of insect pressure unless you can grow very early varieties.
Oh I just read that you’re in my neck of the woods. If you can spray trees, peaches would be my top recommendation, however frost is a risk around here. U pick June bearing strawberries are a great crop that can be accomplished with mostly hand labor and are high demand. My family grew them for about 60 years until recently, I’m the first in three generations not to grow them, because trees are my specialty.They don’t need swd sprays like later ripening stuff like blueberries, cherries, day neutral strawberries and later caneberries. The only other crop that might avoid swd is early trailing blackberries. I don’t know what the demand for figs is, but I’m putting in about a fifth of an acre in '26. They would take minimal spraying. I also have some super sandy soil that I’m growing to put some prickly pear in. Persimmons are another crop that we have occasionally sold a handful of that neighbors have brought in. They sell well, but I don’t know if the demand would sustain over the season. Asian pears are pretty disease resistant around here, not much scab and codling moth don’t like them very much, pseudomonas can be a problem, but a few varieties are resistant. Scab immune apples also will grow well with minimal spraying, but you would have a lot of loss from codling moth. I think table grapes could do really well, and don’t have much disease issues around here. Oh I would also recommend against Euro pears, they have the same labor and spray issues that apples have, but with much less demand. They make us money, but they are a hassle.
How much land do you have and how much experience do you have with different crops? With that knowledge I could narrow the recommendations. Oh I can also recommend some lesser grown high value vegs that do really well for us.
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Your citrus sounds like my figs. I started growing figs as just a novelty, they aren’t too common here and I’d never eaten a fresh one till I grew one. This has turned into 68 potted figs growing out now, cuttings of new varieties from a trade coming in soon, and re-programming my homemade egg incubator to run cuttings so I can get a jumpstart this winter.
I understand trying to limit strangers at your house. I’m currently weighing setup options. By the time the test plantings at my current home are in full production I should have built a house on another lot and be using this place as a rental, so I could put the upick plantings here and have some distance. I’m also considering putting the plantings at the new house but putting them close to the road and adding a fence or hedge between the public pick and my yard to sort of separate things.
I’m no lawyer but I would strongly advise against doing a gender (or race or almost any other group either for that matter) segregated upick. I’m pretty sure saying women or women and kids only would open you up to a civil rights lawsuit. There are people who literally make their living suing or threatening to sue small businesses over various things. Basically legal extortion, but it happens. You could (probably) just not advertise at all and only have friends come. That both limits your market size and increases your odds of “friend discount” guilt trip lol.
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Be careful… i have a friend who loves to garden, he spends a lot of his days out in the garden. He decided to take a nap one sunny day inbetween the rows. His wife saw him laying inbetween the rows and she thought he passed out from sun storke or had a heart attack or something… She called 911 BEFORE she went out to check on him.
You can imagine what happened next.
Probably not the first time this has happened.
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I agree with this one, our u pick customers can drive us crazy sometimes, but can be managed with good planning. The “friend discount” can be a huge problem, we’ve had a lot of customers coming back for 20 plus years and most are great and we’re happy to give special treatment, but there are some that start to expect it and you have to nip that in the bud.
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Oh, a zoo might be a great place to sell oddball shaped fruit and veggies!
Hi! I am in western Oregon, too!
I saw that! Feel free to shoot me any questions you might have. My family has done retail fruit selling for a very long time and I’m happy to share any information you need.
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You could cater to groups such as daycare centers, after school programs, girl/boy scouts/clubs, YMCA programs, etc.
If you make your area very beautiful and provide a space such as a pavilion, you could offer it for rent for small specialty gathering such as baby showers.
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Great idea, just make sure you communicate with insurance to make sure all your bases are covered. Kids can be… enthusiastic in a u pick setting to say the least.
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I think Richard’s comment is very true, I was raised on a farm in West Tennessee, educated and spent 40 years as a civil engineer, so when I retired, I felt a great calling to get back to something close to nature where I truly enjoy everyday outdoors either gardening or managing our fruit trees. My neighbor relies on me to manage his fruit trees as well so there is not much acreage but hardly a day goes by that I’m not busy caring for our production. My wife and daughter do all the selling which pays the majority of our water bill. The benefits of staying fit both physically and mentally and enjoying all the fresh fruit we can eat are well worth the efforts. Plus the friends I have on this website have been and continue to be the greatest of all blessings! What more could one ask for. I have gained so much from the shared knowlege here!
Dennis
Kent, Wa
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Yeah I’ve thought of the civil thing earlier today
Ive been growing tree fruit commercially here in western WA for over 30 years. I started out planting Jonagolds. In the early 1990s there was a growing Jonagold industry here in Skagit and Whatcom counties. There was probably around 20 or so orchards going. Growers were getting like 500-600 dollars a bin which was top dollar especially considering this was just as the WA apple industry was going in the toilet. Problem was the growers couldnt come together about putting in the infrastructure necessary for packing, storage so the whole thing fell apart as eatern Wa took over and started growing them / ruined them.
I ended up taking out 3 acres of Jonagolds and now have aprox 6 acres of apples, pears, plums,peaches.
Your question of how to market your fruit is a good one as you need to build the orchard based on the answer.
I originally, after my Jonagold mishap, went about planting trees as i needed them for my farmers markets. As i became experienced at these i participated in more and more until i was doing 7 a week. 2 each on saturdays, sundays and Wednesdays and 1 on thursday. It didnt matter to me how the orchard was layed out since i was the only one using it.
As time went by and regular customer base built up fast, big mail list etc. Customers more and more would ask if they could visit the farm. Finally i relented and we began having annual 3 day farm festivals. These were an instant hit and as the years went by they got bigger and bigger. Live music, hay rides, outside vendors, food, the whole works. Basically it was a nightmare. Parking was the biggest issue. Had to hire 8 neighbor kids, give them walkie-talkies just to manage the vehicles in and out of our 3 parking areas.
This was the beginning of the u pick though. Up until then we nor any one else in the northwest counties had ever done it. People couldnt get enough of it, they wanted to come on other weekends and one thing led to the next.
I was very happy to not be doing harvest fesivals anymore!
Ok, so back to how the orchard was layed out…
Turns out that randomly planting an orchard isnt so good if you want to use it for u pick.
I have tried many methods to get people to the right trees. Nothing has worked real well. Boils down to, city people tend to get lost easy in a 3000 tree orchard.
I have, starting 11 years ago been replanting the entire orchard to a user freindly layout. One where the varieties are ripening in sequence so people will just be going to one row or area each weekend to pick.
I can say that without a doubt one of the greatest joys of what i do is the satisfaction of face to face sales. There’s not many things that one can do in this life to make a living from that will bring so much joy and thanks as what i have received by direct marketing and at a very reasonable price.
As far as the grocery stores go. You will always take a beating. Grocers have a big margin and that comes out of your end.
I even tried selling at my local coop since they do have a lot of local products. However even those local guys are mostly bigger and are selling at volume prices.
Subsidized programs like farm to school work well for small growers. When i was selling at Pike Place Mkt the market had its own subsidized CSA program which included a huge amount of local fruit.
That was great for me. They contracted with me at the start of the season and payed me retail for wholesale amounts.
Now, that im older and its just my wife and i on the farm we only do one farmers market in the early fruit season and one in the late. Our u pick is most of our business.
I dont know how it is in Oregon but here in Washington, if you do decide to do u pick, downplay the income. Here there is no liability coverage for u pick farms. Has to be a hobby.
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What a write up! Thank you SO much for all of this information! Would it be okay if I messaged you to pick your brain on all of this?
I’m in Olympia now but about to move to Yelm.
I was thinking of putting up different sections of everything like you said. Organized, but I’m still trying to figure out what ripens when. I planned on making little labels for myself with the times they flower and when they start ripening.
I haven’t even gotten to reading about the subsidized programs. Can you elaborate on them and like, explain how that all works?
Again, thank you so much for all this info and letting us know about your experiences and what’s worked.
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I meant to tag you in the previous comment but for some reason, it didn’t.