Elk Ridge Naturals

At Elk Ridge Naturals each picker gets a one-pound plastic clamshell and goes out among raised beds of strawberries with a short list of rules: no walking over the rows, pick only ripe fruit, and look inside the plants for hidden berries. The first three berries are free. The beds lie on an acre about eight miles east of Clark Fork, Idaho, off River Road, in the Clark Fork river valley under the Cabinet Mountains. The farmers, Jeff and Lisa, describe the way as a drive east around Lake Pend Oreille, across the Clark Fork River, and eight miles more, almost to the Montana border.

Four beds of strawberries

The strawberries are sold u-pick and we-pick. The we-pick berries are picked by the farm and ordered through its web shop for pickup, a listing that showed sold out. The Panhandle Farm Corridor, a collective of North Idaho farmers whose guide lists the farm as number 25, gives the season as July 1 to September 30. Every notice from the farm asks visitors to call first, because the ripe berries go fast and someone has to be there when visitors arrive. Families and groups can sometimes come outside the listed hours.

The 2026 season shows how the field runs. On July 10 the farm reported that the long wet spring had set the strawberries back and that large ones were unlikely before the end of July. On July 31 it posted: “We have berries! The plants are loaded.” U-pick was $4.00 a pound. By August 20 only two of the four large beds were bearing heavily, with fruit setting on new plants. On August 29 the farm expected all four at full production within two weeks. By September 4 the berries were “hitting peak production,” and on September 14 the post read “We have LOTS of strawberries!” with all strawberries at $2.95 a pound to the end of the season. The farm says many of its pickers come from Sandpoint and farther. It has drawn people from as far as Wallace, Idaho, and Spokane, Washington, and summer visitors from all over the world. A late-August notice reported a pair of lady’s glasses with red frames and a hat found on the farm, held for whoever lost them.

Currants, peas, and hard-neck garlic

The strawberries share the acre with about 150 currant bushes. In July 2026 the canes were so loaded, the farm wrote, that not many were standing straight. Black currants ripened first, and the red and white followed, each with its own flavor. The farm notes that currants are little known in the United States and popular in Europe. The fruit carries enough natural pectin that jam needs only sugar and a little lemon juice, and the leaves make tea. U-pick currants were $6.00 a pound.

The vegetables were planted on request. The farm asked its customers what they wanted, planted most of it, and timed the plantings for mid-August, “and the plan worked!” That August the u-pick rows held:

• cherry and slicing tomatoes
• green beans and yellow wax beans
• white, red, and Walla Walla sweet onions
• pickling and slicing cucumbers
• dill weed and fresh flowers
• white sweet corn at 75 cents an ear
• purple-hulled, pink-eyed field peas

Crenshaw and Kajari melons were on the July list. Thai and Italian basil sold by the bag. The shop page names three hard-neck garlic varieties, Romanian Red, German Extra Hardy, and Georgian Fire, at $18 a pound, three to five bulbs to the pound. The farm stand also carries winter squash, garlic scape powder, and pints of jam: strawberry-basil, strawberry, red and black currant combined, and white currant. Anyone who buys fruit can ask for recipes. A porta potty arrived in August 2026. Before that, the farm sent visitors to the public restrooms at the Cenex in Clark Fork and at the Heron Store.

Not every crop comes up clean. On August 21, 2026, the farm asked fellow gardeners about its bell peppers, which were perfect while green but grew spots on the bottom as they ripened, the spots turning soft and gray: “Sun scald? Fungal disease?”

Rigs in the open field

The farm’s invitation reads “Stay on the farm. Meet the farmers.” In June 2026 the farmers finished installing new full-hookup RV pads, 30 by 70 feet, large enough for Class A vehicles and also rented by the month. “Tucked right up under the mountain,” the farm’s notice says, “the quiet is so loud you can hear it!”

On July 12, 2026, a Swiss couple traveling North America by trailer as LAtravelFoxes posted that they had found the farm through the Harvest Hosts app and stayed a night. They picked strawberries and black, red, and white currants, harvested basil, and bought jam. They camped in an open field with sun for solar panels and Starlink, noted the level full-hookup pads as an upgrade, and refilled their fresh water before moving on. “Coming from Switzerland, we are huge fans of the u-pick concept,” they wrote, “and practice shows: self-picked is always the best!”

An acre of conifer ground

The farm began in the spring of 2020, when Jeff and Lisa finished clearing an acre near their home. They share the land with elk, deer, and moose, “so up went the fence.” The ground had been conifer forest, and the soil was thin but rich. That year they put in drip irrigation and built more than a mile of raised beds. They chose to grow organically because “we like clean food.” The farm is not certified organic, but it uses organic practices and only organically approved products. The first harvest, by their account, “tasted good.”

In 2021 the first strawberries went into the ground, and by 2022 the u-pick was open. In November 2025 Jeff McClintock spoke for Elk Ridge Naturals in the “Local Food Ways” Ignite! session of the Selkirk-Pend Oreille Food Summit at the Sandpoint Organic Agriculture Center, a program of five-minute talks on farm work in the region. The farmers build their planting beds again every year, and by 2026 they had reached a rotation that replaces half the strawberry plants each season.