Huntley BerryFarm

In the foothills of Mount Canobolas, ten minutes' drive from Orange, the rows at Huntley Berry Farm run heavy through the warmer months with strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and blackberries — pick your own, weighed out at around $15 a kilogram, into whatever basket or box you've brought or borrowed. The season is a generous one by berry-farm standards, stretching from November through to May, so there's time to return more than once as the fruit changes hands from strawberries to the darker, later berries.

What sets Huntley apart is less the fruit than the enterprise behind it. The farm is run by OCTEC as an Australian Disability Enterprise, providing NDIS-supported employment to locals who work the rows, staff the shop and welcome visitors — a working farm in the fullest sense, where the picking experience is inseparable from the people who make it happen. Beyond the berry patch, there's a small menagerie of goats, horses, alpacas and birds to meet, a First Nations Edible Garden worth a slow walk through, and a café for the inevitable post-picking coffee or something sweet. The farm shop sells its own jams and coulis alongside the fresh fruit and vegetables in season, plus other locally made goods — the kind of place where you leave with more than you meant to buy.

It's a spot built for lingering rather than rushing: ample parking, open space for a picnic, and enough going on — animals, garden, café, the picking itself — to fill an unhurried day rather than a quick stop. Set against the Canobolas ranges outside Orange, in a region better known for its cool-climate wines and orchards, Huntley Berry Farm offers something more hands-on and considerably stickier-fingered — a reminder that the region's produce isn't just to be tasted, but picked.