It’s no question that one of my favorite things about Fall is apple picking! Every year, I drive out to Oak Glen, California to pick some apples. I love everything about it. The air is more crisp, you can actually catch a view of some fall leaves, the apples taste amazing and the whole vibe is so peaceful. My friends, boyfriend and I all went to Stone Soup Farm & Heritage Orchard for our apple picking. For our day trip, we woke up around 6:30AM to get ready and we left by 7:30AM (making a 20 minute detour to pick up friends). We arrived around 9:30AM, thirty minutes before the farm opened up their doors to us. If you take the trip down to Oak Glen, I highly recommend getting there early. The later it gets, the harder it is to find parking. We got parking right out front, but when we left around 11:30AM to head to brunch, the place was packed! There wasn’t a parking spot in sight.
The farm takes in groups of thirty or so people at a time to pick apples. Since we were early, we were in the first group. They start out by giving you a brief history of the farm and an orientation on how to properly pick the apples. They also give you a taste of a fresh apple. This farm has Stayman-Winesap apples, which the farm notes are perfect for baking. Since they charge by the pound, you aren’t allowed to eat the apples as you go. Regardless, it’s very fun picking the apples right from the tree!
In addition to picking apples by hand, they gave us this pole (I forget the name of it… whoops) to help get the apples down from the tree that are higher up. It’s a bit trickier than picking the lower apples by hand, but it’s just as fun! They only hand out one pole per group since they’re in limited supply, so we all took turns using it.
So, funny story. One of the first apples that Joey had picked had a giant bite taken out of it! Some chipmunks or squirrels must have gotten to it first. Luckily, the farm will take back any apples with worm holes or bites from other animals to put into their compost pile. Above, Joey was looking for an apple that hopefully wouldn’t have a bite taken out of it. Haha! The farm was really beautiful. I’m a sucker for fruit trees – something about them just looks so pretty to me. In addition to the apples, the farm was growing some cute flowers too.
I came to this farm last year, but some things were a bit different this year. Last year, they had this small stereo hidden in the trees that was playing cute folk music! I was sad to see they didn’t have that this year. It really set the mood and created an extra relaxing environment. Something they did have this year, though, was a cute hay bale bench photo op! Of course, we had to take advantage of it.
Of course, because some (not all) of us are basic, we had to take a million photos while we were there. We took advantage of the portrait mode on Spencer’s phone and had a lot of fun taking pictures! I ended up getting some of my favorite photos with Tom.
While we were out in Oak Glen, I wanted to get some pumpkins. The grocery store pumpkins near me aren’t great (all scratched up, dented and uneven) and even the pumpkin patch near me had sub par pumpkins. I had remembered that Oak Glen had some pretty high quality pumpkins last year, so it was my mission to get some. Stone Soup sold some pumpkins, but didn’t have a U-Pick pumpkin patch. We had heard that Riley’s Apple Farm had a pumpkin patch, so we headed over. Unfortunately, they didn’t have as many pumpkins as I’d hoped (probably since it’s late October), so I picked three small pumpkins and we headed back to Stone Soup Farm.
Once I had my three pumpkins, I told the group I wanted to buy some pumpkins from Stone Soup as well. Theirs were pre-picked, but they had a variety of really unique pumpkins! I definitely wanted some. I ended up buying a large standard pumpkin, a white pumpkin, a goblin pumpkin (the pumpkin with the green warts on it) and a Cinderella pumpkin (the squat, wide, red pumpkin). Not pictured, I also bought four dried corn cobs in varying colors (mixed, yellow, and red/orange) for only $4! I also bought some super delicious apple cider.
Be sure to follow me on Instagram if you want to see how I arranged these unique pumpkins and corn cobs on my porch! Finally, we went to Flo’s Cafe around Noon for brunch (although we all got breakfast food). The food was plentiful and good! Not to mention, cheap! For four people, the check came out to $50.
Have you gone apple picking yet? This is my favorite part of the Fall season! What’s yours? Let me know in the comments below!
Cameron Butler
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