In September 2020, I went apple picking with my kids at a small, quiet orchard in Massachusetts called Windy Hill Farm. It was our first weekend away from home since the pandemic started. The trees were dripping with so much fruit that they looked like they were wearing jeweled capes. My son was ten and my daughter was thirteen, and as they ran and played and picked, the fears I carried about the virus, the changing world, and the terrible news fell away. At home that evening, my daughter made apple chips, which we ate for dessert and breakfast.
Four years later, as her college application deadlines approach, time feels like a storm. Our apple picking tradition seemed like something we couldn’t live without, but choosing an orchard near our home outside of Philadelphia was more complicated than we expected. One farm we used to love now offers a “Premium Package” admission price of $31.99 per person, which includes a quarter pick bag plus a corn maze, hayride and goat food. (The apple cannon, which shoots apples at targets, costs extra.) Another farm nearby doesn’t charge an entrance fee—rides, mini golf, face painting, and their apple cannons are a la carte—but even if we skip those extras, it’s usually so busy that parking resembles a death duel.
Farms like these, which offer what is known as ‘agritainment’, have transformed apple picking from a simple activity into one akin to visiting a theme park. Some people will dismiss this kind of spectacle (or any apple picking for that matter) as trivial. “Cosplay outdoors with us!” the Saturday evening live cast member Aidy Bryant says in a 2019 sketches a parody of the harvest experience. But going to a farm every fall – even if it’s not the most peaceful orchard – can offer more than meets the eye: a ritual, an encounter with nature and a connection to history.
The apple is closely intertwined with American culture. Apple is the first word that many schoolchildren associate with the letter A. It’s the key ingredient to our ultimate pie, the key to keeping the doctor away (according to an aphorism), and of course our most popular phone brand. In a way that many Americans may not realize, apples are also “part of the fabric of our history,” said Mark Richardson, who works at the New England Botanic Garden in Massachusetts and who led the restoration of the historic apple orchard. me. For example, in the 17th century, alcoholic apple cider was an incredibly popular drink in America. Children even drank a diluted version, which was often considered safer than water.
Today, farms across America, including apple orchards, are under threat. When the country was founded, agriculture was the most important thing most common way to make money. But over the past hundred years, the number of farms in the country has declined significantly. According to the Ministry of Agriculturein 1935 the United States had 6.8 million farms; in 2023 there were 1.89 million. The reasons for the decline are multifaceted. Many farmers left the profession to move to the city, and some of the younger generations chose not to take over family farms. Policy changes and financial hurdles have done just that others pushed out.
Running a farm can be expensive and hard work. The costs of production and labor can be high. For small farms, of which the USDA defines Because companies generate less than $350,000 in revenue each year, it is difficult to compete with larger farms and international operations. And for any farmer, there is no guarantee that you will have a viable crop to sell at the end of the season. Elizabeth Ryan, an apple farmer and owner of Breezy Hill Orchard, in New York’s Hudson Valley, told me that her farm lost nearly $1 million last year due to the May freeze. Climate change is making apple cultivation more difficult. Fire blight, caused by a bacterial pathogen active in warmer temperatures, can decimate orchards, Richardson told me. “I don’t think there is a better example of the impact of climate change on an agricultural crop,” he said. As temperatures continue to rise, blight may even become uniform more common.
In this uncertain economic landscape, many small farmers, looking for new forms of income, have chosen to turn their farms into full-fledged recreational experiences, as I saw when I looked for a farm to visit. This type of agritainment has “literally saved farms,” Ryan told me, though she said her orchard largely sticks to the basics. Andre Tougas, a second-generation farmer who owns Tougas Family Farm in Northborough, Massachusetts, told me that his farm focuses primarily on the picking experience but has also expanded its offerings to attract visitors beyond the short window of apple season. It hosts apple blossom chariot rides in the spring, and grows strawberries and other fruits for visitors to pick from spring to fall. After the picking period is over, the farm also continues to sell its own apples, which are usually special varieties that you can’t find in most supermarkets: Rosalees, Ambrosias, Ludacrisps. For the past two years, December has been one of the busiest days on the farm, Tougas said, weeks after the official end of the apple season, just before it closed for the winter.
Before talking to Ryan and Tougas, I had only spent about one day a year on a farm. I had understood so little about the life and struggles of a farmer, and nothing about the lengths farms had to go to to survive. Now I’m lucky enough to be able to visit a farm at all, even the one with mini golf and apple cannons. The activities that once seemed unnecessary and carnivalesque now seem more important. And even on the farms with all the bells and whistles, you can still create a tradition of escaping into nature and finding a quiet place to stay in the orchard.
I’ve always been there in the fall, when time passes in a final burst of color: leaves turning bright hues, fruits swelling, plants going dormant. Ryan told me that her farm has visitors every fall who “come when they get engaged, and come back when they’re pregnant, and come back when they have a little kid… We feel very connected to people.” These connections – to other people, to the natural world – are especially valuable when you consider that we spend much of our lives in a ‘digital landscape’. Timothy Erdmann, a horticulturist at Chanticleer Garden, a public garden in Pennsylvania where I sometimes teach writing classes, told me. When you buy access to an orchard, he said, “you buy the right to forget what you heard on the radio while you drove to the farm.”
I go with my kids because I love the time outside as a family, away from our screens, and because it feels like we are creating memories that my kids will remember for a long time. “Memory is incredibly complicated,” said Lisa Damour, a psychologist and author whose books and podcast about parenting teenagers have helped me through the pandemic. But whether or not my kids form lasting memories of the apple orchard, they’ll likely appreciate the trip, Damour said, because “what kids want most of all is our agenda-free presence” — to know that their parents can let go of their problems. the pressures of modern life and simply ‘joying in it’. When she said that, I thought about how rarely the advice I had read about raising teenagers included joy. And it reminded me of how my mother raised me.
The fall I was 18 was the last I had with my mother. She became ill very suddenly in December and a few weeks later was diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to her liver. She died nine days after diagnosis. Now, more than thirty years after her death, I can barely remember picking apples together. But I can imagine the jars of cinnamon applesauce she made next and her apple chips, which we ate for dessert and breakfast. And I remember her joy for the world, and for me.
This year my kids and I finally went to the nearby farm with the frighteningly busy parking lot. We walked past mountains of pumpkins and gourds and laughed at their names: Lunch Lady, Pink Porcelain Doll, Heap of Happy Harvest. We were on a drive through the orchards and indulged in a “Harvest Float,” a cider slushie with vanilla ice cream and topped with a cider donut, like a hat. It was insanely delicious. We also walked among the trees, and as we did, my teenage son and daughter both held my hands. It confirmed for me the truth of something Ryan had said when we spoke: when people go apple picking, “I don’t think it’s really about getting the apples.”
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