Strawberry Picking Near Atlanta

What: Stawberry Picking Farm
Where: Cottle Farms
Fayetteville(770-719-2600) and Stockbridge (770-761-7822)
When: Mid-April through Early June.
Monday – Saturday 8 am – 6:30 pm
Sunday – 1 pm – 7 pm (Upick please arrive by 6:30 pm)
Cost: 5lb buckets = $10 U-pick, $12 picked
Quarts = $3 U-pick, $4 picked

Since my oldest learned to walk, we’ve gone to pick strawberries with the kids. Its become a tasty rite of spring. There are several U-pick places and you can find one near you here. Scroll down the page and you’ll see the U-pick farms by county.

We went to Cottle’s Strawberry Farms in Clayton County. It’s about a 30 minute ride from Downtown Atlanta. As you can see from the video, there isn’t anything else here but the strawberries, which can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how you look at it. We went to the Fayetteville location, but folks there said the Stockbridge location is larger. Call before you go, if it’s raining, they won’t normally pick and if it’s toward the end of the season, they may be picked out.

A couple of tips I didn’t know. Don’t wash the strawberries until you’re ready to use them. Once they are washed, they start to deteriorate faster. The later you pick the sweeter the berries, but the darker the seeds. Once you get your bucket home, if there are any left, take half and put them in a flat bottomed dish with a dry paper towel on the bottom. The weight of the strawberries on top will crush the ones below if left that way.

A tip from my own experience: Don’t let your oldest convince his little brother to use his shirt as a bucket for extremely ripe strawberries unless you’re filming a battle scene from a war movie.