What I Didn’t Understand About Apple Picking

In September 2020, I took my kids apple picking at a small, quiet orchard in Massachusetts called Windy Hill Farm. It was our first weekend away from home since the pandemic had started. The trees dripped with so much fruit, they looked like they were wearing jeweled capes. My son was 10 and my daughter 13, and as they ran and played and picked, the fears I’d been carrying about the virus, the changing world, and the terrible news fell away. At home that night, my daughter made apple crisp, which we ate for dessert and breakfast.

Four years later, as her college-application deadlines loom, time feels like a gale. Our apple-picking tradition seemed like something we couldn’t miss—but choosing an orchard near our home, outside Philadelphia, was more complicated than we anticipated. One farm we used to love now offers a “Premium Package” admission fee of $31.99 per person, which includes a one-quarter peck picking bag plus a corn maze, a hayride, and goat food. (The apple cannon, which shoots apples at targets, costs extra.) Another farm nearby doesn’t charge an admission fee—hayrides, mini golf, face painting, and their apple cannons are à la carte—but even if we skip those extras, it’s usually so crowded that parking is akin to a death duel.

Farms like these, offering what has become known as “agritainment,” have transformed apple picking from a simple activity into one that can resemble visiting a theme park. Some people might dismiss this sort of spectacle (or apple picking of any kind) as trivial. “Cosplay outdoorsiness with us!” the Saturday Night Live cast member Aidy Bryant says in a 2019 sketch parodying the harvest experience. But going to a farm each autumn—even if it’s not the most tranquil orchard—can offer more than it may seem to on the surface: a ritual, an encounter with nature, and a connection to history.

The apple is closely woven into American culture. Apple is the first word many schoolchildren associate with the letter A. It is the main ingredient in our quintessential pie, the key to keeping the doctor away (according to one 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,” Mark Richardson, who works at the New England Botanic Garden, in Massachusetts, and who spearheaded the restoration of its historic apple orchard, told me. In the 17th century, for example, alcoholic apple cider was an incredibly popular drink in America. Children even drank a diluted version, which was often considered to be safer than water.

[Read: Wild apples]

Today, farms across America, apple orchards included, are under threat. At the country’s founding, farming was the most common way to make a living. But over roughly the past hundred years, the number of farms in the country has dropped significantly. According to the Department of Agriculture, in 1935, the United States had 6.8 million farms; in 2023, it had 1.89 million. The reasons for the decline are multifaceted. Many farmers left the profession to move to cities, and some of those in younger generations chose not to take over family farms. Policy changes and financial hurdles have pushed others out.

Running a farm can be expensive, hard work. The costs of production and labor can be high. For small farms, which the USDA defines as those that make less than $350,000 in revenue each year, it’s hard to compete with larger farms and international operations. And for any farmer, there’s no guarantee you’ll have a viable crop to sell at the end of a 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 because of a May frost. Climate change is making apple growing harder. Fire blight, which is caused by a bacterial pathogen that is active in warmer temperatures, can decimate orchards, Richardson told me. “I don’t think there’s any better example of the impact of climate change on an agricultural crop,” he said. As temperatures continue rising, fire blight may become even more prevalent.

In this uncertain economic landscape, many small farmers, seeking new forms of revenue, have opted to turn their farms into full-fledged recreational experiences, like those I saw when I was searching for a farm to visit. This kind 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 his farm primarily focuses on the picking experience, but has also expanded its offerings to draw in visitors beyond the short window of apple season. It provides wagon rides under the apple blossoms in spring, and it grows strawberries and other fruits that visitors can pick from spring through fall. After the picking window has ended, the farm also continues selling its own apples, which tend to be special varieties you can’t find in most grocery stores—Rosalees, Ambrosias, Ludacrisps. The past two years, one of the farm’s busiest days was in December, Tougas said, weeks after the official end of apple season, right before it closed for the winter.

Before I spoke with Ryan and Tougas, I had spent only about one day a year on a farm. I had understood so little about a farmer’s life and struggles, and nothing about the lengths to which farms had to go to survive. Now I feel lucky to be able to visit any farm at all—even those with mini golf and apple cannons. The activities that once seemed unnecessary and carnivalesque now seem more vital. And even at the farms with all the bells and whistles, you can still create a tradition of escaping into nature, and finding a quiet spot to linger in the orchard.

I’ve always gone in autumn, when time passes in a last burst of full color—leaves morphing into bright shades, fruit swelling, plants going dormant. Ryan told me that every fall her farm has visitors who “come when they get engaged, and they come back when they’re pregnant, and they come back when they have a little kid … We feel very connected to people.” These connections—to other humans, to the natural world—are especially valuable considering 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 admission to an orchard, he said, “you’re buying a right to forget what you heard on the radio driving 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 as if we’re creating memories my children will hold on to for a long time. “Memory is wildly complicated,” Lisa Damour, a psychologist and an author whose books and podcast on raising teens helped guide me through the pandemic, told me. But whether or not my kids form lasting memories of the apple orchard, they’re likely to appreciate the trip, Damour said, because “what kids really want is our agendaless presence, above all”—to know that their parents can let go of the pressures of modern life and simply “delight in them.” When she said that, I thought of how rarely any advice I’d read on parenting teenagers mentioned delight. And it made me think of how my mother raised me.

The fall I was 18 was the last one I had with my mom. She got sick very suddenly that December, and a few weeks later was diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to her liver. She died nine days after the diagnosis. Now, more than 30 years after her death, I barely remember picking apples together. But I can picture the mason jars of cinnamon applesauce she made afterward and her apple crisp, which we ate for dessert and breakfast. And I remember her delight for the world, and for me.

This year, my kids and I ended up going to the farm nearby with the terrifyingly crowded parking lot. We wandered past mountains of pumpkins and gourds and laughed at their names: Lunch Lady, Pink Porcelain Doll, Heap of Happy Harvest. We rode through the orchards on a hayride and splurged on a “Harvest Float,” a cider slushie swirled with vanilla ice cream and topped with a cider doughnut, like a hat. It was outrageously delicious. We also walked among the trees, and when 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.”