Saturday, October 02, 2010

Apples!!!

If you click right HERE you can see some photos about the last time I took Carly apple picking. This time, however, we went to Stribling Orchard in Markham, VA. The weather today was perfect and the drive wasn't bad at all. There were people there, but the place is so big that there was plenty of room - and apples! - for us. This is a closeup of my favorite apples that were ripe today - the Rome Beauty. So good! We missed Honeycrisps at this orchard by three weeks, but we still got a lot of really yummy Red and Golden Delicous, Jonathan and Staymans.

I love Bree in Carly's sunglasses. She ate about four entire apples while we were out there!
We even found a tree with some fruit low enough for her to pick on her own.
Carly was SO busy picking and loading up her bag, she didn't really have time to stop for a photo.

Pretty girl =)
Can you guess what kind this is? It's red delicous and oh MAN they are so good! I don't really like the ones at the store, but right off the tree they are yummm-y. They don't really get super duper red...in fact, most of the apples we saw today were a red/pink/green mix. So interesting!
Paul had this gigantic picker he was using to get the higher apples down. A lot of the orchard had been picked over (literally!!) below about six feet, so we got some of the sweet, sun-ripened ones from the tops of the trees.
While I went to wait in the lo-o-o-ong line to weigh and pay (only 1.15/lb!), the girls and Paul went to go say hi to the animals. This donkey was convinced that Carly and Bree were going to feed it some apples...she just kept coming back over and sticking her face through the fence very hopefully. =)


Love! This is the most beautiful place! The stone farmhouse in the distance is the original house on this 200-year old farm. This land has been worked by the same family for six generations! That is just so cool to me.
Here is the original cider house (I think...) also built around 200 years ago.

In the car on the ride home, the girls were being silly...Bree's serious face cracks me up.


Okay, now, just a warning. The next two photos are SCARY FACES. So if you're at all easy to scare, just flip past them quickly. My girls are quite terrifying.
Observe:

2 comments:

Our Family of Four said...

Whoa thanks for the warning on the scary faces! Don't wanna run into those 2 in a dark alley :o)

Apples... this is just one of many reasons I'm looking forward to going back to the states. HOW FUN! And healthy and educational.

Next year...

Stacey said...

In picture three there are some mountains in the background. I am serious that I would pay you a couple o bucks to take some pictures of those and send it to me. The "fall color" is the only thing I truly miss about living in the Northern part of the South. ~sigh~ Looks like you had big fun.