This Texas Farm Has Been Growing Strawberries Since Before Spring Was a City

She found it! The little blonde girl has been bent over in the same few feet of strawberry plants for the last 10 minutes, completely absorbed. Her U-pick bucket is completely empty but she does not care.

Finally she found what she was looking for, the perfect strawberry. A big red jewel of a berry.  “Mom,” she yells, full of excitement, waving her hands. “I got one! I got a magic strawberry!” Three moms look up smiling. This is Saturday morning during spring strawberry picking season at Atkinson Farms in Spring, Texas.

What makes being here feel almost surreal is acknowledging where you are. Just beyond the rows of strawberry plants, Houston traffic buzzes, apartment buildings loom down, and generic-looking storage units line the road. But here in the fields, none of that seems to matter. 

For a few hours, families slow down, crouch low to the earth, and get completely pulled into something simple and rare in an urban setting. The focus is on those strawberry rows, growing low and intensely green. In season, they are crawling with clumps of families, chatting and laughing as they crawl through them filling their bucket with the fattest, ripest berries.

The warm sweet smell hits you before you even get to the rows.  This isn’t a fragrance wafting on the breeze. It is a big deep hug of thick delicious sweetness that just seems to embrace you with both arms.

Strawberries warm from the Texas sun definitely do not smell like shrink-wrapped grocery store strawberries! And they surely do not taste like them either. They are irresistible. 

A strawberry that ripened in a Texas field and was in the ground this morning is a fundamentally different fruit than the one that traveled four days in a refrigerated truck. 

Sweeter. Denser. You probably forgot what a fresh strawberry could actually taste like. We aren’t talking farm to table. We are talking vine to mouth! And if some berries get eaten right there on the spot, well nobody says anything about it.

At Atkinson Farms, it is pretty much expected. For most of us consumers, the connection with the land has been replaced by bland, pre-treated fruits and vegetables.

Putting aside the nutritional value portion of this equation just for a moment, there are two big losses with this arrangement. Yes, there is convenience, absolutely. But that’s a poor exchange for the absolute joy that eating something fresh and delicious can bring us.

It is unmatched. Your taste buds literally dance with joy. For many local residents, U-picking is a yearly tradition.  As they fill their buckets and squish berries in their mouths, not even old-timers may know that this farm has been here longer than most of the city around it.

A Farm That Outlasted Everything

Mike Atkinson’s grandfather started farming in Harris County in 1923. The land the farm sits on today was purchased in 1961. Four generations of the Atkinson family have worked it since.

“Back then, we were the third house on the left,” Mike Atkinson has said. “Now we’re the third million.” Hard to believe that Mike grew up working the fields alongside horses and mules. Today the farm sits like a postage stamp in a sea of urban development.

Spring, Texas has grown up around Atkinson Farms from every direction. A storage unit complex flanks one side. An apartment complex sits on the other.  And even though the farm has shrunk from 150 acres to 75, the Atkinsons are proud hold outs against development.

“Everyone’s kind of sold out,” Mike has said. “There used to be hundreds of little vegetable farms all throughout Spring and Tomball in the 60s and 70s. Then development started. People got older and their kids just didn’t want to farm anymore, so they sold off the land.”

In 2022, a fire broke out in the storage barn off Spring Cypress Road. Five fire crews responded. When it was over, three tractors and a significant amount of harvesting equipment were gone. Miraculously, the crops in the fields were untouched. The community rallied around them.

The Atkinsons aren’t going anywhere. In fact, Atkinson Farms are expanding in a way that doesn’t require additional acreage. Mike’s wife, Theresa pushed for a farm market on the property. It changed the shape of the whole business.

What started as a stand has grown into the farm’s most visible public face. Regulars stop in weekly knowing they can ask what came out of the ground this morning and get a straight answer.

How many recipes have been exchanged at the counter? Doubtlessly an uncountable amount. Now the farm has a direct connection to the families who would become regulars, who would bring their kids, who would eventually bring those kids’ kids. Including that little blonde girl with the magic berry.

In the Fields

Strawberry season runs roughly late March through May — but it moves with the weather. A cold spring pushes it back. A hot one shortens it.  Be smart and call ahead. 

Entry and U-pick buckets run just a few dollars. But you are more than welcome to bring your own. Strawberries are sold per pound.

On Saturday mornings in April, families arrive in waves and the fields get picked fast. By midday on a busy weekend, there may not be much left. Get there when it opens. Strawberries are not the only reason to come. 

Blackberries run May through July. Blueberries too. More than 60 crops rotate through the year with the Texas seasons. If you are lucky, the day you arrive, the flower fields might also be open for picking. A vase of beautiful Texas-grown flowers will bring a smile to your face every time you walk by it. And they last a bit longer than a strawberry!

Come fall, the corn maze opens, the pumpkin patch fills in, and hayrides run across the property. For many, the fall is their favorite time to visit the farm. But in truth, it is often the families that came for the berries end up on the hayrides six months later.

The Market

Whatever came out of the ground this week is for sale at the market. Corn. Okra. Tomatoes. Watermelons. Local honey. House-made jams. Fresh eggs. The honey is worth stopping for. And like the strawberries, the vine-ripened tomatoes are next level.

Atkinson Farms supplies several local farmers markets, and delivers to more than twenty Houston restaurants including its most respected farm-to-table restaurants. Their relationship with Local Foods has been running for more than twenty years. They can make a same-day harvest to delivery because the farm is thirty minutes from downtown Houston.

Before You Leave

Hours are Monday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm, and Sunday 10am to 2pm. Call before you go for seasonal and weather updates. Mother nature is still the boss lady. Give yourself more time at the farm than you think you need. 

There is something about walking a row of aromatic strawberry plants in the morning light that does not cooperate with hurrying. The kids will not hurry. Here’s your chance to get your family off their screens. A ripe strawberry has powers. Maybe that little girl was right; they are magical!

Ninety-nine years of development have come right up to the farm’s fence. Storage units on one side. Apartments on the other. Houston spreading north in every direction. But Atkinson Farms is still here.

It is still farming the same ground, still planting sixty crops, still opening the gate on Saturday mornings so families can walk the rows together. Some places get swallowed by everything around them and lose what made them worth going to in the first place. Atkinson Farms isn’t one of them.