If I could have the garden of my dreams, I’d load it with fruit. A few peach trees over here, some apple trees over there. Plums, nectarines, grapes—the works. Problem is, it takes great expertise to grow such fruit, expertise that I am without. Which is why, every summer, I spend an inordinate amount of time at pick-your-own farms and orchards throughout Central Virginia.

     As a fruit non-farmer, I haven’t lost sleep worrying about potential mildew, the right time for pruning, or an infestation of Japanese beetles. But I do have the opportunity to adore the act of picking. I’ve become such the picker, in fact, that I can intuit the torque required to relieve a branch of its peaches, without bruising or mangling a single one.

     Well, perhaps that’s an exaggeration. In truth, I simply show up, grab a basket, and gather fruit to my heart’s content. Maybe, if the lower branches have been picked clean, I will need to climb a ladder to reach what remains. But lucky me, that’s where the sun has kissed the flesh and where the best specimens are anyway—with fruit so sweet and juicy, it elicits a Pavlovian swipe of my chin before teeth have even broken through skin.

     Without fail, I fill my basket to overflowing and leave with much more than I intended to gather. And I always make sure to place it on the seat next to me in the car, so that I can—with my family—eat at least a quarter of it on the way back home. At each of these orchards, I make a point of talking with the folks who run the place, to find out what they love most about their work. And almost unanimously, they say it’s not the fruit, but the people. Families come back year after year, and eventually the “children” return with children of their own, to create shirt-staining, sticky-finger-making memories.

     I recently came across The Blueberry Years, a memoir due out in September that celebrates just such a farm. Author Jim Minick, who ran an organic you-pick-it blueberry patch in Floyd County, recounts the hardships and simple joys of growing and selling his fruit; he covers everything from attracting and keeping bees to attracting and keeping customers.

     As Minick proves, the PYO farmer is a patient breed, putting up with the throngs of fruit lovers like myself taking over his fields, many of whom can disrupt months of hard work (discarding perfectly good fruit, simply because there’s a harmless blemish or two, is one of my personal pet peeves). “To fill our field with people takes a bucket of patience and about three buckets of energy,” he writes.

     But thanks to people like Minick, people like me can have the experience without the expertise. And we leave each farm with a whole lot of fruit—and a glimpse at what it would be like to be good enough to grow our own.