Ripe 'N' ReadyCherry Farm

Since 1968, the Easy family has been coaxing fruit from this patch of Red Hill soil, high on the Mornington Peninsula. Eric and Margaret Easy started with strawberries and pumpkins, a stopgap crop while their cherry trees found their feet, and by 1993 their son Simon was selling cherries roadside — a modest beginning that's grown into one of the peninsula's better-known pick-your-own outings. Today Eric and Simon still work the orchard together, and the arrangement remains pleasingly uncomplicated: you turn up, pay your entry, and eat your way through the rows before filling a bucket to take home.

The season is short and weather-dependent, running from mid-November into January, and the model here is refreshingly generous — entry doubles as an all-you-can-eat pass to whatever's ripening that day, with only your take-home haul weighed and charged by the kilo at the farm shop on your way out. Fruit availability shifts by the day and by the hour, a function of ripening and how many hands have been through the rows before yours, so mornings tend to reward you best, and weekdays spare you the weekend crowds. Bring a hat; the orchard offers dappled shade but not much shelter from a Peninsula summer, and budget at least an hour between your last entry and the 5pm close to actually get through the rows and settle up.

Beyond the cherries, the farm shop keeps its own rhythm — fresh eggs, honey, and depending on the week, blueberries, raspberries, zucchini, garlic, avocados or sunflowers, the kind of shifting produce list that rewards a second visit later in the season. Dogs are welcome on a lead, children under three get in free, and the whole enterprise has the unfussy, slightly chaotic charm of a working family farm rather than a manicured attraction — buckets swinging, kids underfoot, cherries disappearing before they ever reach the scales. It sits easily within the Peninsula's wider run of farm gates and cellar doors, worth folding into a slower day spent moving from one roadside stall to the next.