Family Tree Farms: Where Consistently Flavorful Fruit is a Reality

The farm that produces our jumbo blueberries—exclusively for us!—has even more in store.

If you’ve ever tried the jumbo blueberries from Family Tree Farms you know three things: they’re absolutely enormous, downright delicious, and the farm that produces them is doing something right. When it comes to Dave Jackson, a seventh-generation farmer, and his hard-working family of relatives and employees, all of the above is true. That’s why we’ve had such a long-standing relationship with Family Tree—they consistently produce a wide selection of top-notch quality summer fruit.

Even though they’re seasonal farmers, an entire year’s worth of farming goes into each perfect piece of summer fruit. Fall and winter are pruning season, when old twigs are removed to make room for new fruit to develop. The cold temperatures are welcomed because the trees require a certain number of “chill hours” to ensure they emerge strong and healthy in the spring. Once springtime arrives (around the middle of February in central California), the bloom period for each variety lasts around two weeks. This is when their sensational stone fruit—peach, nectarine, apricot, plumcots, and more—start to grow.

Finally, summer is all about harvest! More than 150 varieties are grown on the farm on a given season, with the ripest fruits picked by hand and placed into plastic containers. This picking process is quite intricate, since not every piece of fruit is ready to be picked at the same time. Once the fruit is selected, it’s transported to Family Tree’s main packing facility near Reedley, California.

Family Tree’s world-class research and development center enables them to grow and analyze fruit trees from some of the world’s top breeders, selecting only the most flavorful to plant on their ranches.

Click to shop Family Tree Farms’ delicious stone fruit here.

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