Everyone in the Bay Area has heard of “farm-to-table” food, and most of us have tried it—either a handful of times, a handful of times every month, or perhaps last night for dinner. Still, even if you eat farm-to-table food all the time, it’s probably rare that you actually go to the farm to get it. Throughout the summer, multiple farms in Brentwood offer Bay Area residents the chance to do just that: bring farm-fresh food to your plate.
Brentwood is a rural town in the far East Bay, about an hour’s drive from downtown San Francisco without traffic. According to the local nonprofit Harvest Time Brentwood, over 180,000 “agri-tourists” flock to the otherwise sleepy hamlet each year. Most come to visit Brentwood’s forty-plus “U-Pick” farms, where visitors wander through fields and climb trees to pick their own apricots, strawberries, beans, peaches, walnuts, and more.
During the busy cherry season, Harvest Time Brentwood says that it hands out over 70,000 maps guiding visitors to the best orchards.
Visiting Brentwood to grab produce right off the tree makes for a perfect hyperlocal road trip—one that blends the Bay Area’s complementary obsessions with finding unique food, supporting local farmers, and getting a good deal. Brentwood offers locally-grown food year-round, but the city’s crown jewel is its Summer cherry harvest. During the busy cherry season, Harvest Time Brentwood says that it hands out over 70,000 maps guiding visitors to the best orchards.
I’ve gone to Brentwood to pick cherries almost every year since my kids were born. Even during the pandemic, orchards remained open, and visiting Brentwood to pick cherries was one of our few outings in early pandemic times.
During our visit last year, I was picking cherries with my family—comfortably socially distancing in a massive and nearly-deserted orchard—when a young child from another group walked up to me, idly pulled down his mask, sneezed directly in my face, and disappeared back into the trees. (Luckily, I was fine; he must not have had Covid-19. But we didn’t go out in public for a while after that.)
There’s something hypnotic about wandering the rows of trees, looking for the best cherries before grabbing them and plopping them into your bucket.
In 2020, Brentwood felt deserted. This year, however, the Covid-19-era situation has improved tremendously, and crowds have once again descended on the city’s U-Pick farms. On a recent Saturday, my family drove to Brentwood for our annual cherry season visit.
We like to switch up the farms that we visit each year, and this time we went to Newberry Cherry Farm.
Cherry picking in Brentwood is a casual affair. Most farms set up a stand somewhere in their orchard, rope off an acceptably un-rutted, only-somewhat-muddy area for parking, rent a couple of Porta-Potties, and start issuing five-gallon buckets to any tourists who show up. You wander through their fields, grabbing fruit off the trees and filling your bucket.
At the end of the picking, a helper—usually a teenage child of the proprietors, as many farms in the area are family-owned—weighs your bucket and charges you a per-pound rate for everything you picked. Munching fruit straight off the trees isn’t encouraged, but it isn’t exactly discouraged, either.
Cherries at Newberry ran $3.50 per pound on our visit, versus $4.99 per pound at Whole Foods.
There’s something hypnotic about wandering the rows of trees, looking for the best cherries before grabbing them and plopping them into your bucket. Even though the experience is probably nothing like the daily labor of the migrant pickers who pluck 24 billion cherries from America’s trees each year, there’s something satisfyingly grounding about wandering around an orchard picking your own fruit. Farm-to-table restaurants do a good job of getting eaters marginally closer to the land which produces their food. But in this case, you’re actually standing on it.
Picking fruit in Brentwood is great for kids, too.
If you’ve ever wondered why families in agrarian societies tend to have more children, try teaching your four-year-old how to pick a cherry, and then watch them revel in the repetitive pattern-based monotony of the process until your bucket teems with fruit. And don’t worry: Although agricultural child labor is surely a problem worldwide, even watchdog group ILO says it’s okay to send your kids to the fields as long as they’re given age-appropriate tasks and it doesn’t interfere with their schooling. A morning spent picking cherries in Brentwood seems to tick both those boxes.
The best thing about picking cherries in Brentwood, though, is the delicious freshness and intense flavor of the fruit. Many farms grow a wide variety of cherries, including heirloom varieties you won’t find in the supermarket. Newberry has White Rainier, Sweetheart, Papin, Utah Giant, and Coral cherries. We gave some to a family member, and he declared them the best cherries he’s ever had.
Because you do much of the labor yourself, they’re cheap, too. Cherries at Newberry ran $3.50 per pound on our visit, versus $4.99 per pound at Whole Foods. We picked nine pounds and baked them into a pie, in addition to eating them raw. We even made cherry ice cream.
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Alas, this year’s cherry season, which stretches from May to mid-June, has already closed. But it’s still strawberry season in Brentwood, and the area offers top-notch pumpkin picking come to Fall. If you’re looking to connect with the land, bond with your kids, or just bring a little piece of a real farm to your table, check out Brentwood for a hyperlocal road trip.
For a list of Brentwood farms offering U-Pick produce, visit Harvest Time Brentwood.
