About PickingHours

PickingHours lists pick-your-own farms in the United States — pumpkin patches in the autumn, choose-and-cut Christmas tree farms from November, with corn mazes and seasonal events alongside them. It covers Texas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Washington, Oregon, Michigan and Virginia, organised by the city people actually drive from.

It is free to read, free to be listed on, and no farm has ever paid to appear or to appear higher. Nobody is left off for refusing to pay, because nobody is asked.

Almost every “Christmas tree farms near me” article is last year’s article with the year changed. The dates are from the previous season, the prices are from the season before that, and the farm that closed two years ago is still on the list. You drive forty minutes and find a locked gate.

The work here is the boring part nobody else does: opening every farm’s own website, reading every page of it, and writing down what the farm actually says.

Every listing follows the same rules, and they are worth stating because they are the whole product:

• The farm’s own words first. Dates, hours and prices come from the farm’s website, its Facebook or Instagram, or an email or phone call with the farm.
• Never a directory. Trade-association and aggregator listings are not used for dates, prices or whether a farm is open. They go out of date by a whole season and read as current.
• A date with no year is not this year’s date. Farms leave last season’s page up for months. Where the year is not stated, the listing says so.
• If something is not published, the listing says “not published”. It does not get filled in with a guess or with last year’s figure.
• Every listing is stamped with the date it was last checked and where the information came from.

We do. In October a farm near Houston was listed as having been closed for a season it had traded through, because a directory’s end-of-season label was read as a going-out-of- business one. The farm told us, we corrected the page the same day, apologised, and wrote down the rule that stops it happening again.

That is the deal here: things will occasionally be wrong, and when you tell us they are, they get fixed quickly and the correction is not hidden. If a listing about your farm is wrong, write to us and it will be changed, usually the same day.

PickingHours is run by Migena Ndreu, independently. It is not owned by a farm, a trade body or a tourism board, and it takes no money from any farm it lists.

The site earns its keep through advertising, which is why you will see ads on these pages. Advertising has no bearing on which farms are listed, what is written about them, or the order they appear in — those are decided by opening date and distance, nothing else. How advertising works and what it does with your data is set out in the privacy policy.

Questions, corrections and farm listings: hello@pickinghours.com, or the contact page.