How these listings are checked

Not from a growers’ directory, not from a news roundup, not from another listings site. Those are useful for finding out that a farm exists, and they are used for nothing else. Every date, price, species and opening hour on this site was read on the farm’s own website, or came from the farm itself.

Every listing carries the date it was last read, at the foot of the card. If that date is old, you can see that it is old. Nothing here is written once and left.

Plenty of farms never post a date. Rather than guess, or copy a figure from somewhere that guessed, we email them one short question and wait. When a farm answers, the card says so and gives the date of the reply — so you can see the difference between something a farm published and something a farm told us.

It works more often than you would expect, and it has a side effect we did not plan: farms go and fix their own websites. Three did so in a single week this autumn, one of them writing back “I have updated our website” without being asked. One farm corrected its own street address for us — its website gave one number and its map link another, and neither was right.

If an address bounces, we say so rather than printing a dead one as though it worked.

The commonest way a listings site goes wrong is printing last year’s dates as this year’s. Farms reuse their season pages, and an undated “Friday, November 28” looks current until you check it.

Thanksgiving 2026 is Thursday 26 November. So Black Friday is the 27th, the Saturday before Thanksgiving is the 21st, and “Friday, November 28” is last season — in 2026 the 28th is a Saturday. Every undated date list on this site has been put through that test, and where the weekdays do not fit this year, the card is left undated and says so.

It cuts both ways, which is how we know it is doing real work. Two Michigan farms were read the same evening: one publishes 21 November, which is exactly the Saturday before Thanksgiving this year; the other publishes 22 November, which was that Saturday last year. Same test, opposite answers.

Some farms publish a standing rule instead of a date — “we open the Sunday before Thanksgiving every year”. We work out what that means for this season and print it, but the card says in as many words that the date is our arithmetic and not theirs, and the season is not marked as confirmed.

Where a farm has told us by email that it opens on a named day this year, that is the farm’s own answer, and the card says that instead.

• A directory’s opinion of whether a farm is open. One growers’ association listed farms as closed this season that were trading normally. We got that wrong once ourselves, told the world a working farm had shut, and heard about it from the owner. Open-or-closed now comes from the farm or it does not go up.
• A price we cannot date. If a farm’s price list is headed with last year, the card says so in those words, or the price is left off.
• Our own uncertainty. Where a farm’s pages contradict each other we decide which is current and print that one. Handing you two figures and an explanation is not an answer.
• A ranking we have not actually checked. “The cheapest in the county” only appears where every other farm on the page has been compared.

Some of this will be out of date, and some of it will simply be wrong. Farms change their minds, sell out early, and shut for a season without telling anyone.

Tell us at hello@pickinghours.com and it gets fixed, usually the same day. A farm that would rather not be listed at all only has to say so.