About
Twenty-five seasons in the same dirt
Bellingham Country Gardens is a family-owned no-spray u-pick farm on E. Kelly Road, in the Mt. Baker area. Sam Grubbs has lived on this land for sixty years and raised four kids on it. The u-pick garden has been going since 2001 — twenty-five seasons of the same ground, worked the same way, and it stays this size on purpose.
The place
Small enough to do it right
This isn't an agritourism operation. There's no corn maze, no gift shop, no cider donuts. It's a handful of rows, a stand with a scale on it, and one man who plants, weeds, waters and harvests nearly all of it.
Two open days a week is what one pair of hands adds up to. The other five go to everything that makes Wednesday and Saturday possible — the transplanting, the irrigation, the endless weeding that comes with growing without herbicide.
What you get out of that trade is a field where you can hand your kid a strawberry off the plant without thinking twice about it, and produce that was in the ground an hour before it was in your kitchen — to eat this week or put up for later.
How it's grown
The short version
No spray, ever
No pesticides, no herbicides. Weeds get pulled by hand or hoed. Tasting is encouraged, so you know you'll enjoy it.
Picked by you
Almost nothing here gets harvested before you arrive. That's why the berries taste like berries — they never sat in a cooler waiting on a truck. Tasting is encouraged.
Grown for the table
Varieties get chosen for flavour, not shipping durability. Some of them bruise if you look at them wrong. They're also the best thing you'll eat that week.
Succession planted
Beans, beets and carrots go in in waves so there's something worth picking every open day from June to September, not just one good fortnight in July.
Ever-bearing berries
The strawberries are ever-bearing varieties, which means they come back in flushes — June, then again in late summer, instead of one short burst.
Two days a week
Wednesday and Saturday are the open days. The rest of the week the field is being worked so those two days are worth showing up for.
Flowers from Petit Fleuri
The dahlias out front are his daughter-in-law's. Anne Grubbs grows them here on the farm and cuts them fresh for the roadside flower stand from mid-summer on. More about the dahlias →
Come out, walk the rows, take home more than you meant to. 2838 E. Kelly Rd · Wednesdays & Saturdays