Justin VanNatta, who owns Hockinson Market and helped start the Hockinson Main Street Team, has said out loud what most residents already know: Hockinson isn't really a town. It's a spot on the map you drive through on the way to Battle Ground. And yet for one Saturday in July, the intersection of Northeast 159th Street and Northeast 182nd Avenue behaves exactly like a downtown, because the people who live around it decided it should.
That decision is the story of summer here. If you've been in Hockinson long enough to know which turn puts you behind a school bus, this is a look at what your neighbors have built into July, where the berries in your freezer actually come from, and how a farm that started before Washington was a state still sets the rhythm of the calendar.
The Saturday The Milkshake Line Tells You Everything
The sixth-plus year of the Hockinson Blueberry Festival runs from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, July 19, on the grounds of the Hockinson Community Center at 159th and 182nd. The Hockinson Main Street Team hosts it in partnership with the Hockinson School District, and the whole thing is volunteer-run.
The festival started in 2020 as a pandemic-era attempt to keep a scattered community feeling like one. VanNatta has described the origin plainly: a group of neighbors wanted to remind each other they were connected, and the blueberry farmers seemed like the right people to build the first event around. The first year or two, Hockinson Market pushed out just over 100 blueberry milkshakes across the whole festival. The line for those shakes is now one of the reliable signs that summer has actually started.
What's on the schedule:
- Live music on the community center lawn. Past lineups have included The Vantucky Ramblers, Kirby Swatosh, and The Thilo Kloth Trio.
- A blueberry pie baking contest, judged as entries arrive in the morning.
- A pie-eating contest that closes the event, announced right as the crowd tightens up around the judges.
- Fresh berries from Prairie Berry Farm and Majestic Farms Blueberries, plus blueberry lemonade, pudding rounds, coffee cake, and popcorn.
- Booths from Barn Dog Flower Farm, Good Year Farms, Half Moon Farm, Heirloom Family Micro Farm, Kreations By Kiely, Hummingbird Hill Farms, and the Hockinson Heights Elementary School Garden Club selling lavender bundles.
"It's a very friendly community and a lot of different agriculture," Polly Chan of Prairie Berry Farm told The Reflector after last year's festival. Her family's ten-acre place in Brush Prairie has been harvesting blueberries since 2015.
The festival's timing is deliberate. Peak Washington blueberry season runs from mid-July through early August, and the festival slots itself right at the front of that window so u-pick openings and roadside farm stands catch the traffic while they can.
Where The Berries Actually Come From
Once the festival wraps, the buckets come out. Three farms within a short drive of the community center handle most of the u-pick demand, and they don't run the same operation. If you've only ever picked at one of them, here is what the others are doing differently.
| Farm | Where | Season | What's different |
|---|---|---|---|
| Majestic Farms Blueberries | 18500 NE 182nd Ave., Brush Prairie | Opens late June, Earliblue rows first the week of July 1 | Mon–Sat 8 a.m.–8 p.m., Sun 8 a.m.–7 p.m. Cash, card, check, tap. Buckets and bags provided. On-site honey. |
| Prairie Berry Farm | Brush Prairie, ten-acre property with roughly four acres in blueberries | Opens early July, runs up to two months | Family-run since 2015. Smaller footprint, quieter fields, direct grower interaction. |
| C.R. Berry Farm | Hockinson | Opens early July | Farmstand carries marionberries alongside blueberries, which is unusual for the immediate area. |
A note on variety, since it's the thing that actually determines whether the row you're picking tastes like anything: early-season Earliblue and Duke ripen first, and the mid-to-late Bluecrop and Chandler show up later in July. Majestic opens with Earliblue, so if you go the last week of June you're getting a different berry than if you go the last week of July at the same farm. That's the kind of detail worth asking the person at the checkout table before you drive out.
Blueberry season here runs four to six weeks depending on weather, so the "we'll go next weekend" plan has a shelf life.
Bi-Zi Farms, The One You Already Know
Drive south from the community center about four miles and you're at Bi-Zi Farms, 9316 NE 119th St. in Brush Prairie. Most Hockinson residents know it as the pumpkin-patch place in October. What's easier to forget is that Bi-Zi has been in some form of operation since 1872, that Bill and Peggy Zimmerman still hold about 28 of the original 180 acres, and that the farm is now working with sixth-generation family members in the business.
The produce side of Bi-Zi is largely the result of a middle-school entrepreneurial project. In the early 1990s, Bill's son Doug started raising sweet corn to save up for computer parts. Strawberries, tomatoes, and zucchini followed. On a good pickling-cucumber day the farm can move 2,000 pounds of a single crop, according to Anicah LaFrenz, one of the sixth-generation family members now working the store.
The farm store runs year-round, which is worth remembering when you're standing in your kitchen in mid-August wondering where to get a flat of tomatoes without driving to a grocery store. It's also part of why Bi-Zi shows up in a parade a few miles north: at the 2026 Hockinson Fun Days on May 30, Joe Zimmerman drove a tractor pulling a wagon down 159th, which is the kind of thing that only makes sense in a community where the guy on the tractor is also the guy whose corn you'll be eating in September.
The Rest Of The Rhythm
The Blueberry Festival gets top billing, but it isn't the only summer marker on the calendar. If you've been here a couple of years, these are the events that quietly tell you where you are in the season.
Hockinson Fun Days, late May. The 2026 edition drew thousands to 159th and 182nd on May 30 for the parade, a Friday-night bingo at Hockinson High School (attendance up roughly 20 percent year over year, according to organizers), a Fire District 3 pancake breakfast, a marketplace bazaar outside the school, and a carnival inside the community center. Parade awards this year: Hockinson Market took Best Float, the Hockinson High School Band won Best Performance, First Student's Hockinson bus drivers took Best Motorized, Latigo N Lace Equestrian earned Best Animal, and the Brush Prairie Singers won Best Youth. New event coordinator Kara Kadow ran her first year in the role.
Camp Hock at Hockinson Heights Elementary, June through August. Weekly themed camps for incoming first through fifth graders at $335 per week, run through Hockinson Community Ed. The season closes with a Blue Ribbon Bonanza county-fair-themed week August 10 through 14. Lego Camp for incoming second through fourth graders and USTA Pacific Northwest's Tennis Afterschool Zone also run out of HHES.
The community center parking lot as unofficial town square. Between Fun Days in late May, the Blueberry Festival in July, and Bi-Zi's Harvest Days and Pumpkin Patch starting in October, the same corner of asphalt at 159th and 182nd carries most of the year's public gatherings. That's the mechanism VanNatta described. There isn't a downtown, so a parking lot has to do the work of one. And it does.
Why This All Matters If You Already Live Here
The reason to know any of this isn't that it's charming, though it is. It's that these events are the actual glue. The farms that show up at the festival are the same farms whose stands you drive past in August. The bus drivers who won Best Motorized at the parade are the same ones who'll pick your kid up in September. Justin VanNatta at Hockinson Market is on the volunteer team that organizes both. When people say Hockinson feels like a small town despite not technically being one, this is the specific mechanism they mean.
If you've been in the area for years and never actually walked through the Blueberry Festival, July 19 is a short morning. If you've never picked at Prairie Berry Farm because you always default to Majestic, drive the extra few minutes this year. And if you're thinking about what your own place here is worth after another season of watching this community keep itself stitched together, Karen Higgins has spent more than three decades in Clark County and would be glad to talk it through. Request a free home valuation and local market consultation whenever you're ready.
