Chappies

The Yarra Valley's hills roll high enough to catch cool air and hold onto it, which is precisely why the Chapman family have been farming this stretch of Silvan since 1894. Four generations on, Chappies remains their patch of ground — some 50 hectares of it — and it carries a small but genuine claim to local history: it was here, in 1970, that Gordon Chapman came home from a trip to the United States with an idea nobody in Australia had properly tried before, and turned his cherry orchard into the country's first pick-your-own farm.

The season announces itself in colour. From November, sweet cherries hang glossy in the rows alongside raspberries and blackberries, the whole hillside humming with the particular, unhurried business of people filling buckets by hand. By December the sour cherries follow, tarter and better suited to the kitchen than the mouth, and the pick stretches on through January before the branches empty out for another year. There's no rush built into the experience — you walk the rows, you taste as you go, you fill what you've brought or what's handed to you, and you pay attention to which trees are laden and which have already been worked over by the morning's earlier arrivals.

A farmgate shop trades daily through the season, the practical bookend to the picking itself — the place to weigh in, to pick up what you couldn't be bothered harvesting yourself, or simply to buy a punnet of berries picked by someone else's hands that morning. It's a modest, working orchard rather than a day out dressed up as one, which is arguably the point: five decades after Gordon's idea took root, Chappies still operates on the same logic — that the valley's cherries and berries taste better an hour after they've left the branch, preferably with dirt still on your fingers.