About
Twenty years of the same few acres
Bellingham Country Gardens is a family-owned no-spray u-pick farm on E. Kelly Road, in the Mt. Baker area. Sam Grubbs has been growing u-pick produce here for about twenty years, two days a week, June through October — and it stays that 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 rows of food and flowers, a stand with a scale on it, and a family that plants, weeds, waters and harvests all of it.
Two open days a week is what that 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.
How it's grown
The short version
No spray, ever
No pesticides, no herbicides, no synthetic fertilizer. Weeds get pulled by hand or hoed. Bugs get managed by rotation, timing and tolerance.
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.
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
Greens, beans and roots go in in waves so there's something worth picking every open day from June to October, 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
Anne Grubbs grows dahlias and seasonal cut flowers here on the farm, cut 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