Kitsap Farm Tour

Each host farm on the Kitsap Farm Tour has a welcome booth staffed by volunteers. Admission is free, and families can leave the suggested donation of ten dollars per car there. The tour is self-guided. Visitors drive themselves from farm to farm across Kitsap County between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and stop wherever they like. To keep pathogens from traveling between properties, the organizers ask visitors to wear clothes and shoes that have not been worn on another farm or garden. Visit Kitsap Peninsula advises closed-toe shoes, and cash or a card for farmstands, tastings, eggs, scones, and lavender.

The 2026 tour was the fourth. It ran Saturday and Sunday, August 8 and 9, the first time it had stretched to two full days. Ten farms took part. Most were open both days, but four were open on one day only, and those four divided by geography. Visit Kitsap Peninsula’s suggested route therefore spent Saturday in North Kitsap and Sunday working south from Central to South Kitsap. A tour app carried maps, each farm’s activities, and the partner farms and food vendors set up alongside the hosts.

Saturday: cider, eggs, lavender, and draft horses

Bushel & Barrel Ciderhouse and Beaver Bend Farm are run together on NW Beaver Ridge in Poulsbo. The farm keeps goats, donkeys, and Scottish Highland cattle, and its earlier tour listings also name Kune Kune pigs, chickens, ducks, turkeys, rabbits, alpacas, and sheep. Visitors sit around a bonfire with a cider and hear live music. The family behind the ciderhouse told Visit Kitsap about mornings on the farm: the donkeys bray, the cows moo, and the goats start up before anyone reaches the gates. “People weren’t just coming out for cider — they were coming out because they wanted connection,” they said.

Tilthy Rich Farm is a small Bainbridge Island farm known for its duck and chicken eggs, and it was the island’s Saturday-only stop. On the morning of August 8 the tour’s Facebook page listed its program: holding brand-new baby ducks, a noxious weed scavenger hunt, a lesson on bees, and building a birdhouse. Up Highway 305, Bluetree Farm and Forest set out a pollinator activity for children, a walk through its food forest, and cotton candy. The farm is known for its lavender fields, wreath-making workshops, and farm-to-table dinners. The 2023 tour brochure called it Bainbridge Island’s only lavender farm and noted that its cotton candy was made with lavender.

Bainbridge Vineyards, on NE Day Road, closed out Saturday in Visit Kitsap’s plan. The winery is women-owned and women-run. All its grapes are grown on the estate and certified organic, and the vines are worked with draft horses, which graze within sight of the Olympic Mountains. In 2026 the vineyard offered a leaf-pulling activity, a vineyard tour, live music, and tastings in its wine garden. Winemaker Betsey Wittick told Tideland magazine that the cool maritime climate yields a lighter, more delicate wine than the heavier reds of Eastern Washington. “We want people to come to the farm and have a sense of something that’s from here,” she said. “It delivers that taste of place.”

Sunday: Port Gamble Road to the Olalla Valley

Sunday began north of Poulsbo at Farm Kitchen, on Port Gamble Road NE. It is a working produce and flower farm with gardens, a cedar grove, and a community commercial kitchen. In 2023 Tideland reported a newly finished pavilion of Douglas fir timber overlooking rows of dahlias, and u-pick flower events called Flowers and Fika, named for Poulsbo’s Scandinavian heritage. Courter Country Farm, the other Sunday-only stop near Poulsbo, is an organic flower farm and event venue with flower gardens, farm animals, and tractor rides. Owner Denise Courter told Tideland which animals visitors go to first: “The bunnies are the favorite, hands down. It’s always the bunnies!”

From there the route ran south to Red Roof Ranch in Port Orchard, which has goats, horses, ponies, pigs, a lavender field, and a flower garden. Earlier tours there offered u-pick lavender and a hayride in an old covered wagon. In Olalla, EB Daniel’s Farm and Garden was established in 1994 among hemlock and Douglas fir. It raises poultry, pork, rabbit, and seasonal vegetables, and Visit Kitsap says visitors from past tours still talk about its fresh-baked scones.

Dragon Wheels Farm, on Olalla Valley Road, began as a hobby that its owners say “truly turned us into farmers.” It keeps rescue animals for the rest of their lives. There is a llama, there are peacocks and baby goats, and there is a pig that sits on command. Visitors pull carrots from the ground and walk to a salmon stream that runs through the property. Visit Kitsap advises asking about the frogs around the pond. “Here we invite you in equal measure to sit back in a chair and enjoy the sunset or to pick up a pitchfork and clean out the barn,” the owners said.

Olalla Vineyard and Winery is just down the road, and its vines slope toward water and mountain views. It manages two and a half acres of vineyard and processes every grape it grows on the property. On the Sunday of the 2026 tour, from noon to 2 p.m., Kathleen from WillaBella Farm ran a hands-on educational table there for children.

Strawberries under the vines

The ground at Bainbridge Vineyards is, by Visit Kitsap’s account, the oldest continuously farmed land in Kitsap County, apart from the years of Japanese exclusion. It was once part of the Suyematsu family strawberry farm, founded in 1928 by Akio Suyematsu, a Japanese-American farmer who mentored generations of Bainbridge Island growers. Among them were Gerard and JoAnn Bentryn, who founded the vineyard. Wittick worked with all three.

The winery’s first site was not this one. According to Tideland, it was established just outside Winslow in 1977. That land is now a housing development called Vineyard Lane, and the soil lies under concrete foundations. The business moved a few miles up the road to the Day Road ground. The magazine set the move against a county figure: according to the USDA Census of Agriculture, Kitsap lost 61 percent of its farmland between 1997 and 2017.

A monthly meeting of farmers

The tour grew out of that kind of arithmetic. In 2022, WSU Kitsap Extension reported that a new farmer group focused on agritourism had formed in the county. Extension gave it administrative help, grant writing, and resources. The group took in more than 25 local farms and met monthly. That year it received a grant together with Visit Kitsap to support joint promotions for 2023. By 2023 the group, now called the Kitsap Agritourism Coalition, counted more than 30 farms. Jess Sappington, Extension’s food systems coordinator, was listed as organizer of the first tour. “We have a lot more smaller, homestead farms,” Sappington told Tideland, contrasting Kitsap with the larger farms of Skagit and Jefferson counties.

The first Kitsap Farm Tour ran on Sunday, August 13, 2023, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., at eight farms. Washington State tourism and Visit Kitsap Peninsula supported it alongside Extension. The 2023 brochure listed Winney Farm on Bainbridge Island, where the Winney family started farming in the 1940s, and The Smithshyre, a five-acre Poulsbo homestead with baby goat playtime. It also listed Pheasant Fields Farm in Silverdale. That farm was once part of a 640-acre homestead; logger Peder Peterson bought 20 acres of it in 1885, his nephew Conrad made it an egg ranch in the early 1900s, and the Johanson family bought it in 1949.

The second tour, on Sunday, August 11, 2024, opened 11 farms and drew more than 2,000 visitors from the county and beyond, according to West Sound Magazine. That year the Kitsap Community & Agricultural Alliance began supporting the tour, and it later became the coalition’s fiscal sponsor. In 2025 WSU Regional Small Farms and the coalition’s farms held a series of Dirt Talk Farm Walks for other farmers. On April 24, Steve Hogg and Candace Ladley walked a group through Sawdust Hill Alpaca Farm, and on June 4 a group toured the lavender at Bluetree. In 2026 the tour expanded to two days. When it was over, the tour’s Facebook page posted: “See you all next year!”