The Outhouse Orchards...

Yesterday morning we got up bright and early, got in our Zipcar and started driving to North Salem, to the Outhouse Orchards for a spot of apple picking!

The drive to North Salem was beautiful, driving on some of the same roads that go up to Bear Mountain, surrounded by all the trees with their changing leaves, in the beautiful Sunday sunshine - it was fantastic, even taking a wrong turn here and there was enjoyable, because we got to see more of the area.

About an hour and a half later we reach Outhouse Orchards...

It was pretty busy as we arrived, there were even carpark ushers in the field, just like a Chatters. So we parked up our little car in a slightly muddy field and walked over to the all American looking farm...

Straight away we saw all sorts of amazing looking pumkins, apples, gords, and other kinds of squashes and funny looking things. There were small pumpkins, HUGE pumpkins ($250 huge!), white pumpkins, bobbly pumpkins... I didn't know there were so many kinds...

 It was so lovely, there were lots of families turning up to pick apples, lots of little children climbing all over the HUGE pumpkins, people picking up their sacks ready for apple picking, people picking apples out of the big crates full of pre-picked fresh apples...

We went over to the little tent with the apple sacks to get ours ready for picking. There was only one size of apple sack which would fit a whoooooole lot of apples in it, it cost $25 per sack (which is a bargain for the number of apples you get, but not we didn't want that many apples!), so we decided not to get one. Although the girl in the tent said that we were more than welcome to walk around then 100 acres of apple orchards and if we happened to pick a couple of apples and eat them on our way, that'd be fine... which was nice!

So we made our way up to the orchards, passing the big pumpkin patch...

 ... and then passing the Corn Maze...

 ... and finally into the orchards.

There were lots of people, all with the sacks and their big apple picking sticks - with a special claw like thing at the end and a little net on to catch the apples. We didn't have a picking stick to being with, so we tried some different methods...

 It looked like some other apple pickers had forgotten to get a picking stick too...

There were LOADS of apples all over the ground under the trees, some were a bit bad, but some of them were fine... yum!

The views from the orchards were beautiful, it reminded me a lot of being home and looking out of my bedroom window...

After watching us struggling to get any apples (and probably fearing for their safety as I pelted old apples up in to the trees to try and knock some down), someone pointed out an old apple picker on the ground. It was a bit mangled and bent, but it made a pretty good shaking stick...

 Before long we were spotting some right beauties on the top branches...

Not long after shaking a load loose some little boys came and invaded our turf. I think they must have heard the bounty falling from the branches and wanted a piece of the apple action. They needed a little bit of help reaching the top of the tree with the sticks, so we helped them get some apples and then made our way to the next orchard.

The tractor was doing the rounds, giving hay rides to people who didn't fancy walking in the mud, or mainly for people whose legs were little for all that trekking.

After strolling through the different orchards and collecting as many apples as we could carry without it looking like we were stealing them, we made our way back to the farm to pick out a halloween pumpkin.

As we got closer to the farm again we heard some music playing, and then spotted the band playing on the back of a tractor trailer!

It was so brilliantly stereotypically American, I didn't even see this kind of thing when I was in Arkansas! We loved it!

There was a constant, steady flow of families making their way up to the orchards, by the time we were leaving (around lunch time), it's amazing to think that there were enough apples to go round, but there obviously were as people were leaving with 2-3 sack fulls!

We got a little punnet of apples (to do a bit of cooking with) and we got our pumpkin (details to be revealed in a couple of weeks!) and paid up at the shop. We'd read on the internet site that they had 'world famous cider donuts', so we asked the lady at the shop about them. Apparently we had to go down the road to the Harvest Moon Market to get those. So that was our next stop on our Sunday adventure...