With strawberry season in full swing here in Southern California, we’ve been seeing sweet local strawberries pop up everywhere for sale. On roadside fruit stands, at grocery stores, and in menus of restaurants that feature locally sourced ingredients. So when our preschool announced a field trip to go strawberry picking at Tanaka Farms, an organically-grown family farm here in Southern California, I signed us up immediately!

Please note that this post was originally written in 2019, before the COVID pandemic. We recently did their strawberry picking tour again, so I have added additional info and photos at the bottom about the COVID-safe modifications Tanaka Farms has made to the tour as of May 2021. TLDR: We enjoyed it even more than we did the first time as a result! 

 

Tanaka Farms

Located in Irvine, California, the heart of Orange County, Tanaka Farms should be on every family’s list of places to visit when they come to Southern California. It’s almost hard to believe a farm like this can still exist in the midst of all the freeways and housing developments. But I think it has survived due to its success as a local institution. It’s the best farm in our area for many reasons.

This 30 acres of rolling fields filled with dozens of fruit and vegetable varieties has been in the same Japanese American family for generations. They cultivate non-GMO fresh fruits and vegetables that are seriously more delicious than anything you can find in a super market. The farm offers tours and classes throughout the year that are open to the public for a very reasonable cost. They also apply responsible farming practices and give back to the local communities through charitable fundraisers and their CSA program.

Click here and here to see the kinds of delicious produce I have received as a CSA member from the farm!

Our preschool in fact benefits from their CSA program, where they donate back a percentage of every box that’s delivered to the school. Tanaka Farms offers this to schools throughout Orange County. It’s a great way to buy sustainable non-GMO produce, reduce packaging waste, and support your child’s school all at the same time!

While Tanaka Farms is not a certified organic farm, they follow organic growing practices as much as possible. I’ve read up about it on their website here, and have talked to their staff and other families who are CSA members. So I feel comfortable knowing their produce is organically-grown from non-GMO seed to harvest in almost all cases. Buying farm direct also has a lower environmental impact since it is local and sustainably-sourced.

Tanaka Farms offers U Pick Tours throughout the year of whatever crop happens to be in season.

In the fall it’s pumpkins and other vegetables. In the winter it’s Christmas trees. In the summer it’s watermelons and corn. And in the spring, it’s u pick strawberries!

In fact, they offer these u pick tours all through strawberry picking season, which is typically from February through June.

 

Every U Pick Tour begins with a guided wagon ride.

After checking in for your strawberry picking tour, you walk over to a covered waiting area where you queue up for your guided open air wagon tour of the farm. These come frequently so the wait is never long. And they’re pulled by a tractor which the kids really got a kick out of!

A farm staffer narrates the drive as you rumble up dirt paths through fields of edible leafy greens and gourds, rows of banana trees, and a cornucopia of other crops. And as we passed each area our guide was full of interesting facts about how they’re grown and harvested. He explained crop rotation, composting, companion planting, etc. The kids learned so much!

 

Even better, we stopped multiple times along the route to sample fresh produce.

 

We ate sweet carrots, bok choi, cilantro, and more. My son (who missed this field trip) would’ve loved this part of the tour because he eats anything and everything green (except avocado for some reason). My daughter however was saving her stomach for the strawberries and so I got to eat double portions of everything. And it was all delicious.

 

 

As we drove by this hillside of ice plants, our guide noted that these purple blooms open up to sunlight. It happened to be mostly cloudy during our visit (and thank goodness since the sun can be brutal here in SoCal and there’s no shade in the fields). So only some of the purple flowers had opened up. But he said typically when he arrives in the morning they’re all green. Then as the day progresses and the sun comes out the hillside slowly turns entirely purple. So beautiful!

 

Pick Your Own Strawberries

 

Finally we arrived at the strawberry fields. The first thing you notice is that they are grown using drip irrigation. That means that instead of growing directly out of the earth, they are suspended out of the ground and grow vertically down instead of up or out. And they are grown in mulched coconut husks rather than regular dirt.

Our guide explained that this helped to keep them safe from pests on the ground, thereby reducing the need for pesticides. Drip irrigation helps to conserve water as well, which is drought-prone Southern California, is incredibly important.

It’s also an effective way to keep them cleaner since they’re not laying on the dirt. We were able eat them right off the stem without having to rinse them off first.

 

The brilliant thing about this multi-level drip irrigation method and kids is that it meant there were strawberries at their eye level.

They didn’t have to reach up to pick them. And conversely, I didn’t have to stoop down to pick them since the top row was right at my eye level too.

 

 

HOT TIP: When picking strawberries, you don’t want to just pull them off the stem. That risks pulling the entire root of the plant out of the ground and also smushing the strawberry in the process. Instead, you want to snap the stem a little above the strawberry itself. I found that if the strawberry was ripe and ready for picking, it snapped off the stem very easily.

 

Strawberry Picking Galore

Our guide gave us each a plastic container and 15 minutes to fill it. We were also allowed to eat as many strawberries as we wanted during that time. His sage advice was to fill our containers first and then eat the rest of the time.

Have you read that book, Blueberries For Sal by Robert McCloskey? Well if you haven’t you absolutely must. (And if you use my affiliate link to order it from Amazon, I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you.) But basically, that story is what happened with my daughter and the strawberries.

Well, except the part about the bears.

Every time I put a strawberry into my container, she ate it. Every time she picked a strawberry herself, she ate it. Plink, plank, plunk. I actually had to work hard to fill our container before 15 minutes was up because of the rate at which she was consuming these sweet delicious berries!

 

Strawberry Growing Facts

One of the coolest things about strawberry picking – in addition to eating your own body weight in freshly picked strawberries – is seeing how they’re actually grown. Our guide told us that one of the ways Tanaka Farms employs responsible farming methods is by using compost instead of traditional chemical fertilizers. In fact they were currently growing strawberries in three different kinds of compost to see which way works best.

 

We got to see the complete life cycle of a strawberry:

 

 

You see that rounded yellow center in the flower? That’s a future strawberry!

And this is where the importance of bees come in. Once it is pollinated by a bee, that center of the flower starts to grow into what will become a red ripe strawberry!

 

 

In the photo above, you can see the flower center has started to grow outward. As it gets bigger, the flower petals splay out and become the green leaves you’re used to holding a strawberry by!

 

 

Other Fun Stuff At Tanaka Farms

After we filled our containers, we got back on the wagon and returned to the area by the front where we embarked for our tour. The fun didn’t there though!

 

 

As you can see from the label on the container above, Tanaka Farms has a licensing agreement with Sanrio to use their Hello Kitty, My Melody, Keropi, and other favorite characters on their farm. They had wooden cut outs and other statues of the characters that you could take pictures with.

There is also a fun play area for kids where they can climb on tractor wheels and play with sand diggers. There’s also a chicken coop and petting zoo area.

It’s a great way to let them run off all their extra energy after eating so many fresh strawberries!

You can buy fresh produce at their farm stand or take home a souvenir item with Farmer Hello Kitty on it. This store is open to the public even if you don’t do a “u pick strawberries” tour. Once we finished our container of strawberries (which didn’t take long), I rinsed it out so we can reuse it for toy storage.

 

 

2021 COVID-Safe Protocols Update:

As mentioned at the top of this post, we revisited the farm again post-pandemic and experienced a slightly different version of this strawberry picking tour as a result of their COVID-safe modifications. For starters, as of May 2021, Tanaka Farms requires everyone to wear face masks and observe social distancing while on the farm grounds. (Please note these COVID-safe protocols may change, so check the farm’s website for the most up-to-date info). 

The total number of people allowed on each tractor-driven tour is less than before as a result, which was awesome for us. We lucked out and happened to have 14 people flake out on our tour, so we ended up with an even smaller tour group. We even had our very own section of the tractor separate from the two other parties on our tour!

 

Though the tour is advertised as being for strawberry picking, it also includes one other stop to pick a vegetable on the farm, which rotates depending on availability. We got to pick baby Mexican onions, which thrilled my mom who came with us on the tour, because she can use them to make kimchee and other yummy Korean dishes. (This additional stop was in lieu of the pre-COVID version of the tour where you’d stop along the way and be handed various fresh crops to sample from the fields.)

 

 

When we got to the strawberry portion of the U-pick tour, each family/party on the tour was assigned our own row, to maintain social distancing. My kids had an absolute blast picking strawberries, and asked if we could come back to do it again before we had even filled up our first container!

 

 

Our driver took the long way back afterwards, which was nice because we got a neat tour of the farm, including this display of different tractor blades.

 

 

After disembarking from the tractor wagon, we were invited to walk over to the Barnyard for a self-guided visit to their petting zoo.

 

There was a Tanaka Farms employee there who explained all about the animals to us and reminded us to leave our produce outside. I’m guessing the goats would’ve loved to eat our entire haul if we’d have brought it in! They also had a lot of clear signage up with factoids about each of the several kinds of animals inside the Barnyard.

 

 

My kiddos LOVED getting up close to the animals and even petting a few of the friendlier ones.  This COVID-safe version was awesome because they didn’t have to jockey with a big crowd of other people for the animal’s attention, and it seemed like the animals were calmer and happier as a result too.

 

 

There were some more animals in outdoor pens beyond the enclosed Barnyard. We saw ponies like the one pictured below, plus a donkey and a “miniature” cow, which still weighed 700 pounds!

 

 

There were a couple photo op areas by the Barnyard as well and a tractor your kids could climb on if they wanted to. Everything was very well spaced out, and there were so few families on site due to the COVID-safe social distancing that it almost felt like we had the farm to ourselves for most of the time.

 

 

Tanaka Farms also currently has two options for buying produce and other farm goodies on your way out if you’d like (and I highly recommend doing this!). You can either buy them at the open air stand by the entrance/exit, or do the drive-thru produce stand from the comfort of your air conditioned car. (And by the way anyone can do either version of these produce stands, you don’t have to be there for a tour to shop).

We have done the drive-thru in the past and it is really wonderful. The staff is so friendly and eager to pick out the best fresh produce and other goodies (like fresh baked goods, local honeys, jams etc.) for you. It’d be nice if they kept this as an option even after they lift all their COVID-related safety protocols!

We had a fantastic time at Tanaka Farms and felt very safe the whole time. In fact, I personally enjoyed the experience more this time with the COVID-safe modifications. It felt like a semi-private tour and we were able to chit chat with the staff more as a result. Also, my kids were able to fully enjoy the experience without feeling crowded or like they had to share the animals with a ton of other people.

 

 

So if you’re in Southern California and looking for a great strawberry picking experience (or other produce in season), Tanaka Farms is the spot!

 

• gardening
• organic food
• responsible farming
• Tanaka Farms