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Each row is a crop and the bar is the window it is worth ringing ahead about. The pale tick inside the bar is the fortnight the crop is usually at its best — not the fortnight every farm is open. Hover a name for what to expect and who grows it.

A u-pick window is looser than anything else charted on this site. A market opens on a date somebody decided in February. A field opens when the fruit is ready and closes when it has been picked out, which on a good strawberry year is a fortnight earlier than the farm hoped. Read every bar as this is when it is worth ringing, never as this is when it will be open.

✦ marks a crop only a handful of farms open to picking. It is not a warning about the crop. It is a warning that the bar is real but the addresses are few, and that turning up without ringing is how the trip gets wasted.

An extreme cold snap through the winter and spring killed the raspberry and blackberry crop at Lynd Fruit Farm and at the Patch on 37, the two largest u-pick cane operations in the region. Both have cancelled u-pick berries for the season; Lynd will still sell picked berries at the market. Lynd's Asian pear day is in doubt for the same reason.

The bars below are the normal central Ohio windows, because that is what a calendar is for, and the affected rows carry the failure in their notes. A chart that quietly redrew itself around one bad winter would be worse than useless the following year.

Fall raspberries are the exception and the workaround. They fruit on first-year canes, so they can crop in an autumn after a winter that killed the summer canes. They are the best chance of picking a raspberry in central Ohio this year.

The group that starts the picking year and the group that fails first in a hard winter — strawberries are a crown that overwinters at ground level and came through 2026; the canes stand up in the wind and did not.

Crop	Window	Usually best
Strawberries	20 May – 25 Jun	early June
Everbearing Strawberries ✦	20 Jun – 5 Oct	late August
Black Raspberries	20 Jun – 20 Jul	early July
Summer Red Raspberries	25 Jun – 25 Jul	early July
Purple Raspberries ✦	1 – 31 Jul	mid-July
Fall Raspberries	25 Aug – 15 Oct	mid-September
Blackberries	1 Jul – 20 Aug	late July
Blueberries	28 Jun – 25 Aug	late July
Currants ✦	25 Jun – 25 Jul	early July
Gooseberries ✦	20 Jun – 20 Jul	early July
Elderberries ✦	5 Aug – 20 Sep	late August

Strawberries are the shortest major window on the chart — about five weeks, and a hot fortnight takes a week off the end. Circle S gives its season as Memorial Day to Father's Day, which is the local rule of thumb; Legend Hills publishes 1 to 25 June.

Blueberries are the best-served crop in the region. More farms grow them for picking here than any other fruit, most of them small and several by appointment only. Bushes are shoulder height and there are no thorns, which is why it is the crop to take a four-year-old to.

Gooseberries have no address behind them at all. The row is on the state availability chart and no central Ohio farm currently advertises picking. Ohio only lifted its ban on growing Ribes in the 1960s, after the white pine blister rust programme, and the plantings never really came back — which is also why currants are down to one farm.

The fewest farms and the shortest windows, and the group an Ohio late frost takes out most often, because the trees flower in April.

Crop	Window	Usually best
Sweet Cherries ✦	5 Jun – 5 Jul	mid-June
Sour Cherries ✦	15 Jun – 15 Jul	late June
Peaches	10 Jul – 10 Sep	early August
Nectarines ✦	20 Jul – 5 Sep	mid-August
Plums ✦	1 Aug – 10 Sep	late August

Peaches are the best-value picking trip in the region — two full months, and Branstool grows more than twenty varieties that ripen in sequence rather than together, so early August and early September are different fruit. Legend Hills publishes 20 July to 5 September, the tightest window any local farm commits to.

Sweet cherries are barely a central Ohio crop at all: the orchards are on the lake plain where the water holds the spring frost off, two hours north of Columbus.

The autumn, and the group that carries the region's u-pick economy.

Crop	Window	Usually best
Apples	15 Aug – 1 Nov	late September
Pears	25 Aug – 20 Oct	mid-September
Asian Pears ✦	20 Sep – 10 Oct	early October
Concord Grapes ✦	25 Aug – 30 Sep	mid-September
Table Grapes ✦	20 Aug – 10 Oct	mid-September

Apples have the longest window and the deepest bench on the chart — eleven weeks and enough farms behind them that a picked-out field on a Saturday is not the end of the trip. Lynd opens most varieties on Thursdays and runs three separate orchard blocks, posting which one is open before the weekend, so the address to drive to is not fixed even at one farm.

Asian pears are the narrowest window on any chart on this site: one farm, and usually one day — Lynd runs it as a single-day event in early October.

Hocking Hills Orchard keeps 1,700 heirloom apple varieties, 125 pears and a hundred grapes, which makes one early-autumn visit there three crops rather than one.

Everything picked standing up. It opens the year in April and closes it on Halloween.

Crop	Window	Usually best
Asparagus ✦	15 Apr – 31 May	early May
Rhubarb ✦	20 Apr – 15 Jun	mid-May
Green Beans	20 Jun – 15 Sep	late July
Sweet Corn	10 Jul – 20 Sep	early August
Tomatoes	15 Jul – 10 Oct	late August
Peppers	20 Jul – 5 Oct	late August
Sunflowers	10 Aug – 10 Sep	late August
Zinnias ✦	15 Jul – 20 Sep	late August
Pumpkins	15 Sep – 31 Oct	mid-October
Winter Squash ✦	1 Sep – 15 Nov	early October

Asparagus is the first thing pickable in Ohio and the row that ends the ten-week dead season. Cut rather than picked, and the field is walked every second day for six weeks.

Rhubarb overlaps the strawberries at the end of its window for about a fortnight. Nobody planned that and it is why the pie exists.

Sunflowers run as a four-day event at most farms — Lynd gave 13 to 16 August in 2026, the Patch on 37 gave 25 August to 4 September. Blink and the field is cut. Zinnias are open far longer, because a cutting patch keeps flowering as it is cut.

Pumpkins are the busiest six weeks of the central Ohio picking year, and the one crop where the field is the smaller half of the trip — wagon rides, mazes, zip lines and a car park charge. Everywhere closes on Halloween, hard.

Winter squash opens a fortnight before the pumpkins and outlasts them by a fortnight, which makes it the last thing pickable in central Ohio in a normal year.

Two layers, and they disagree on purpose.

The base windows are the Ohio Department of Agriculture's Fresh Produce Harvest Calendar, published through Ohio Proud — the statewide availability chart, one row per crop. That chart is availability, not picking: it runs wider at both ends because it includes the commercial harvest and the tail a grower holds in cold storage, and because it covers a state that runs a week early on the Ohio River and a week late on the lake.

Every window above is that row tightened to central Ohio and to the fortnight the farms actually open the field, using dates the farms publish themselves — Legend Hills' strawberries from 1 to 25 June, Lynd's sweetcorn day, the Patch on 37's sunflowers from 25 August. Where a farm's date and the state chart disagree, the farm's date moves the edge.

Berry windows are cross-checked against Ohio State University Extension, which is the authority on the one thing the ODA chart does not separate: that July is the peak month for blackberries and raspberries, and that blueberries run mid-July into mid-September.

• Central Ohio U-Pick Farms — the map, the addresses, and who grows what
• Tracking — every tracker on the site, all sixty of them
• Columbus Farmers Market Seasons — the same idea for markets
• Columbus Farmers Markets — where the markets are
• Ohio Wild Mushroom Seasons — the wild version of this chart
• Strawberries · Peppers · Tomatoes