LongShot Farms

LongShot Farms is a quiet blueberry farm on Wolfskin Road at Arnoldsville, east of Athens in Oglethorpe County. It runs on an honesty box: you take a bucket, pick, and pay at the end. Reviewers describe it as a staple, and it holds 4.9 out of five.

What You Can Pick

• Blueberries - the main crop, and there are a great many bushes
• Figs - the only fig picking found anywhere near Atlanta

The berries open at 7am. On timing, the most useful advice comes from a picker who went in the second week of June and suggests waiting another week or two, when far more of the fruit has ripened.

What to Bring

• Your own container to take the berries home, or keep one of the farm's buckets for $2. They come in one and two gallon sizes
• Picking buckets are free to borrow while you are there
• Closed-toe shoes and long trousers. There are fire ants on some bushes and mounds near the base of others
• A bottle of water. There is nowhere to buy one

Cash or payment apps. No cards.

Good to Know

Two gallons of blueberries works out at about twelve pounds, and one adult with a tween took an hour and a half to pick that much.

Go early, before half past ten, in the evening while the light holds, or any time on an overcast day. There is a portable toilet, benches under shade trees and a tyre swing, which is what makes it bearable with children in a Georgia June.

A few of the bushes have wild blackberries growing through them, so there are thorns to catch on, and there is goat muck underfoot in places.

Pro tip: pour everyone's pickings into a farm bucket occasionally to keep track of the quantity, then tip them back into your own containers at the end and leave the farm's behind. That is a regular's trick and it saves the $2.