An Afternoon of Apple Picking

This weekend my parents were in town and while we did a ton of fun activities but my favorite might have been how we spent our Sunday afternoon apple picking. Growing up every Fall we would drive an hour North of my home town visiting a handful of orchards and this we decided to relive some childhood memories. Therefore we rented a car, left the city in the late morning and decided to go apple picking at Harvest Moon Farm & Orchard. It has definitely become much more commercialized than I remember in 20 years ago but we still had an awesome time.

The website says that apple picking is available April through December but when we went to visit in late October while the pumpkins were in full season but the trees were almost picked completely bare.  To be honest, I get it, you need to pick the apples when they are ready and this year we had a bad hurricane.  However, after 20 minutes of wandering around the orcahrd with our glasses of Harscrabble Cider (see more here) we were pretty disheartened to see that all of the trees had no real apples on them but thanks to a maintaince guy we found a dozen trees in the back corner of the orchard that had ripe apples for the picking!

Yes, I did climb a few trees for the heck of it but then we got down to business with the apple picking. All four of us contributed and we filled up the bag with amazing apples from our long pickers and then engaged in an awesome game of family apple baseball – something we definitely have been doing since my brother was old enough to lift the heavy metal apple picker! Take a look at some of these action shots:

Then with an overflowing bag in tow we headed back to the main farm house and because we had gone to the far corner of the orchard we had a long walk back. As a reward for all of our hard work we enjoyed a sweet corn before heading out for the day.

Have you ever gone apple picking?