What a U-Pick Orchard Website Needs (and What It Doesn't)
The pages a u-pick orchard website needs — picking-now status, a variety calendar, per-bag pricing, rules — and the pages you can safely skip.
A u-pick orchard website has one customer: a person who searched "apple orchard near me" on a Thursday and wants to know what's ripe, what it costs, and whether to come Saturday. Everything on the site either answers that or gets in the way. This guide covers what to include, what to leave out, and how to keep it current with ten minutes a week.
The one question: "what's picking right now?"
Apple customers are loyal to varieties, not orchards. Someone who wants Honeycrisp will drive past two orchards to get to the one that says Honeycrisp is ready. Someone who wants Haralson for pie doesn't care about your SweeTango.
So the single most important thing on your website is a picking-now list, on the home page, dated, that looks something like this:
Picking now (updated Fri Sept 26): Honeycrisp, SweeTango, Cortland. Haralson starts next weekend. Zestar is picked out for the season.
Three things make that line work:
- It's dated. An undated list might be from last year. A list dated this week is trusted.
- It says what's finished. "Zestar picked out" saves you forty phone calls and a dozen disappointed families.
- It says what's next. The Haralson customer now knows to come in a week instead of calling.
Update it every Friday in season. On a site where that's a single field you edit from your phone, it takes under a minute. On a site where you have to log in to a dashboard, find the page, edit a paragraph and hit publish, it won't get done by week three, and the site starts lying.
The variety calendar
Below the picking-now line, most orchards benefit from a full-season table. It answers "when should I come for X?" for every variety you grow, and it's one of the pages that ranks well, because people search "when is Honeycrisp ready in Minnesota."
Here's a sample for a central-Minnesota orchard. Dates shift a week either way depending on the year; say so above the table.
| Variety | Typical picking window | Best for | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zestar | Late Aug – early Sept | Eating fresh | First of the season; goes fast |
| SweeTango | Early – mid Sept | Eating fresh | Limited trees; weekends only |
| Honeycrisp | Mid Sept – early Oct | Eating, salads | Our biggest block; peak crowds |
| Cortland | Mid Sept – mid Oct | Pies, sauce, salads | Doesn't brown when cut |
| Haralson | Late Sept – mid Oct | Pies, baking | The Minnesota pie apple |
| Fireside / Connell Red | Early – late Oct | Eating, storage | Keeps until February in a cold garage |
| Regent | Mid Oct – season end | Eating, storage | Last to ripen |
If you grow pumpkins, raspberries or strawberries too, give each crop its own short table or its own line in the same format. The point is one place where a customer can plan a visit a month out.
Keep the table honest. If you list 14 varieties and 9 of them are a handful of trees that are picked out in a weekend, you'll have customers arriving for apples that aren't there. List what people can realistically pick.
Pricing: per bag, per pound, or per peck
Say the price on the website. The orchards that write "see us for current pricing" get the phone calls; the ones that write "$1.89/lb, or a half-peck bag for $12" don't.
The three common structures, and what to write:
| Structure | What to write | Works best when |
|---|---|---|
| Per pound | "$1.89/lb, weighed at checkout. A half-peck is about 5–6 lb." | You have scales and a checkout line |
| Per bag | "Half-peck bag $12 · Peck $22 · Half-bushel $38. Bags provided; fill them full." | You want fast checkout and fewer scales |
| Admission + bag | "$6 admission (includes wagon ride and a cider sample), then $12 per half-peck bag" | You run a bigger operation with hayrides and a store |
Whichever you use, add the two lines customers ask about most:
- Is there a minimum? "No minimum purchase to enter the orchard" or "One bag per group minimum."
- Can I bring my own container? Almost always no, because it's how you count. Say it kindly: "Please use our bags — it's how we keep the pricing simple."
Pre-picked apples in the store should have their own line, usually a dollar or two more per bag than u-pick. And if your prices change mid-season (some orchards drop the per-bag price in late October), schedule the change on the site the same day you change the sign.
The rules page nobody reads until they need it
Orchard rules exist to protect trees and keep insurance happy. Put them on the plan-your-visit page, short, with the reason:
- Pick only from the rows marked open. The ribbons tell you where the ripe fruit is.
- Lift and twist; don't pull. Pulling takes next year's bud with it.
- No climbing trees or shaking branches.
- Eat what you pick in the orchard — we'd rather you taste than guess — but please don't bring in outside food to the rows.
- Dogs: on leash, in the parking and picnic areas, not in the orchard rows.
- Wagons and strollers welcome; rows are grass and manageable in dry weather.
That last one is also your accessibility note. The agritourism website checklist covers restrooms, parking and the rest of the logistics in detail; if your orchard also sells pumpkins or runs a maze, use that list.
Pages you actually need
For most u-pick orchards, five pages cover it:
- Home — picking-now line, hours for this weekend, price summary, "Get directions," three or four photos from this season.
- Apples & varieties — the variety calendar, what's good for what, pre-picked vs. u-pick.
- Hours & pricing — full season dates, weekly hours, last entry, every price.
- Plan your visit — directions, parking, restrooms, rules, what to bring, dogs, payment methods.
- Contact — phone, email, address, a simple form for group and school inquiries.
If you have a store with cider, donuts and jam, a sixth page for "Farm store" earns its place. If you sell gift boxes or cider by the case online, that's online ordering and belongs on a page of its own, usually with a cart.
What you can skip
Most orchard websites carry pages that cost time to maintain and do nothing for the customer. You can safely drop:
- A blog you update twice a year. A dated picking-now line does the same job better. If you want a news feed, make it the picking-now history.
- An "our story" page longer than 150 words. A paragraph and a family photo on the About section of the home page is enough. People trust an orchard that's been there since 1978; they don't need the full history.
- A recipes page. Nobody searches your site for pie recipes, and it's never kept up. One line, "Haralson is the pie apple," is all the cooking advice your site needs.
- A photo gallery with 60 photos from 2017. Keep 6–10 current ones on the home page and the visit page. Replace them each season.
- An events calendar for events you don't really run. If you do a fall festival weekend and a cider pressing day, two dated lines on the hours page beat a calendar widget with 28 empty days.
- A map of the orchard. Row markers at the farm do this. A map on the website rarely matches what's actually open that week.
Every page you don't have is a page that can't be out of date.
Keeping it current through the season
The orchard season in the Upper Midwest runs roughly eight weeks, late August to late October. That's eight Friday updates. Here's what each takes, on a site built for it:
| When | What to update | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Two weeks before opening | Season dates, prices, variety table dates, new photos | 30 min once |
| Every Friday | Picking-now line, weekend hours, any weather note | 5–10 min |
| When a variety sells out | Picking-now line ("Honeycrisp picked out") | 1 min |
| After a storm | Status banner ("Rows muddy; wagons not recommended today") | 1 min |
| Season end | "Closed for the season — thank you. See you late August 2027." | 2 min |
The season-end line matters more than it looks. A site that goes quiet in November with "Honeycrisp ready now" still on it looks abandoned by March, and Google notices. One line, with next year's approximate opening, keeps the site alive through the winter.
What this means for your website
Your orchard website is a dated picking-now line, a variety calendar, honest prices, and a visit page with the rules. Five pages, updated every Friday for eight weeks. The design matters less than whether the Honeycrisp line is true today. If your current site makes that update hard, that's the thing to fix, before the design, before the photos, before anything.
Every orchard site we build puts the picking-now status in a field you edit from your phone, with the variety table, pricing and visit page written from your intake answers. The Roadside plan ($1,495 setup, $49/month) covers an orchard that sells at the farm; Harvest ($2,995, $79/month) adds online ordering for cider, gift boxes and group bookings. See what we build for u-pick and agritourism farms or compare plans and pricing.