Zaanstad lies in the Zaan region, an area with a rich agricultural history closely intertwined with windmills, food processing and the green polders of Noord-Holland. Along the Zaan river, which meanders through a wide polder landscape, farms have been growing vegetables, fruit and flowers for the urban market for centuries. The proximity of the Beemster Polder — a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the earliest rational land reclamations in the Netherlands — gives the region a unique landscape richness. Not far from the iconic Zaanse Schans open-air museum you’ll find pick-your-own farms where you can experience direct contact with farm life.
U-Pick Farms in and around Zaanstad
Around Zaanstad, Purmerend, Wormer, Oostzaan and Landsmeer you’ll find a variety of pick-your-own farms and fruit gardens where you are very welcome. You can pick strawberries, summer flowers and seasonal vegetables in the green Noord-Holland polder landscape .
The best u-pick farms near Zaanstad: our picks
Zaanstad is the city of windmills, mature cheese and green polders — and also of an agricultural hinterland that many city-dwellers overlook. Leave the A8 towards the Beemster, the Wormer or Waterland and you enter one of the best-preserved peat meadow landscapes in Europe. In that landscape, picking gardens grow that put the Amsterdam crowds behind you.
Nine kilometres from Zaandam, towards Amsterdam, Pluk! Boterbloem CSA works with its organic CSA model: weekly vegetable harvests from May to November on a plot that keeps its members closely involved in the agricultural cycle. Garlic, chard, chicory — fresh and visibly unsprayed.
To the north, in Stompetoren at eighteen kilometres, Voedselbos & Pluktuin Heer ikigai has combined a picking garden with a food forest: alongside flowers you can also harvest vegetables, coriander, fennel and poppies. The atmosphere of a neighbourhood project with organic principles in a polder setting.
Het Groente Genootschap in Castricum and Heemskerk, sixteen kilometres away, offers four seasons of organic vegetables — from lettuce and fennel in summer to palm kale and turnip tops in winter. A membership garden that still produces fresh crops in November.
On the edge of Zaanstad and Amsterdam, in Weesp at twenty-one kilometres, Pluk me! is ready with organic field bouquets and flower picking in the warm months — a peaceful base for swapping the city for a flower field.
Anne-Marie Fontijn , at comparable distance, offers an even more personal character: a small-scale picking garden that beats the large farm gardens in tranquillity.
Tip: the Beemster Polder east of Zaanstad is UNESCO heritage and cycle-friendly. Combine a picking farm visit with a ride through the oldest rational drainage polder in the Netherlands.