Picking Apples at Raven Hill

It’s that time of the year again. The air is cool, the wind a little crisp. This morning at six, it was still dark out.

This time of the year is always tinged with a bit of sadness. No more summer. No more heat. No more picnics at Two Lights. Bummer.

But as we get closer to Halloween and the first days of wearing sweaters, I start to perk up a bit. It’s apple season! Time to pile in the car and take Dash out for his first orchard excursion. That in itself would have been an easy task, though we wanted to find an organic orchard that was within an hour of Portland. I was surprised at how difficult that turned out to be. There are only two.

Two.

Out of about twenty-one.

That means nineteen orchards within an hour of us are spraying their apples with pesticides. That sucks. But that is not the point of this so I’ll let it go. For now.

We (Neil, Dash, me, and my parents, aka Meme and Bum) drove over to Raven Hill Orchard in East Waterboro on Sunday. (They don’t have a website yet, so no link! But see here for further information about how to find them.)

They’re in their first year of production and it’s a beautiful little spot. Go go go if you’re thinking about going. And if you’re not thinking about going, what’s your problem?
Go! You don’t even have to pick apples. You could just hang out in their coffee shop and laugh at your lame apple picking friends. You know, there’s something for everyone.

Anyway, as it turned out, Dash didn’t really want to pick apples. Go figure. What he elected to do was sleep. Through the entire two hours we were there. But the rest of us had a great time picking a few common varieties and lots of tasty heirloom apples.

Hudson’s Golden Gem, anyone?

Holiday gift spoiler alert!!

This is going to make some mighty fine apple butter for someone’s Christmas toast.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Dashiell, Food, Living the Good Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.