The sun is hot, as it traditionally is on a Saturday morning, and a certain amount of manual labor is required here. Every now and then, beads of sweat peek through your shirt, and your city feet need a few minutes to adjust to the relatively hard clumps of earth. The feet—and the shoes, too.
Yes, there are some challenges in the Yitzhaki orchards for spoiled Israelis who didn’t grow up on a moshav (that is, me), but the reward is sweet. Very sweet. Sweet to the point that you glance at your fingers and at a certain point—too late by anyone’s standards—you realize you're dripping red juice and making a mess.
And that, without knowing in advance, is exactly what you wanted to happen.
A very specific and very focused craving. Yitzhaki Orchards
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The Yitzhaki family’s big project started from a very specific and very focused craving for the Himalayan mulberry. They planted one experimental tree in the private garden at Kfar Hess, saw that it was good—and tasty—and expanded. That exponential growth continued, of course. Plot after plot, orchard after orchard, and now ten dunams of a land flowing with milk and mulberries.
The season is short and is peaking right now, pushing growers and distributors to stock store shelves but also inviting Israelis to experience it themselves—to pick and taste, and pick more and taste more, until you find yourself full of mulberries. What a strange-wonderful feeling that is.
The family background gave no hint of this story—not at the starting point and certainly not at the present one—with non-farming parents, and five siblings—Yos, Itamar, Yael, Ela, and Roy—none of whom had taken this path. “I compare our journey to a heart,” says Yael, one of them. “Each of us went in a different direction and drifted away, and then we all met in the middle, at the center, together.”
Now, when they're not on reserve duty, they all orbit around that red-purple fruit with all its tasks, including a proud dad who directs traffic that Saturday morning, and a group dynamic that’s incredibly calm, very smiley, and decidedly un-Israeli. Moshav-style, in short.
The concept here is well known—Fridays and Saturdays in May, 09:00–15:00, NIS 40 entry per person (from age two), which gets you an all-you-can-pick experience, with the option to grab a mat and sit among the trees for a picnic (there’s even a jachnun stand nearby for reinforcement). Want to take some home? A small box will cost an extra NIS 20, and a trio sells for 50. I probably don’t need to remind you how much these would cost at the supermarket.
All around, there's no other word for it—excitement. Childhood memories surface here, and epic tales of determined tree climbers circulate among visitors. No one hasn't had one of those experiences. No one hasn't missed it. This particular crop—one of the few cultivated systematically in our area—sparks something warm and deeply Israeli inside.
It’s hard to manage and hard to pick because the boxes must reach the shelves flawless and because the fruit is delicate. But you—of course—are invited to set delicacy aside. The trees are intentionally low so that kids can handle them too, and everything is bursting with fruit. Dark mulberries and pale white ones, some slightly tart, all generally wonderful. Saturday morning. A beautiful day. Again.
Mulberry picking, Yitzhaki Orchards, Kfar Hess