We opened our Pick Your Own Apple season on September 7, the first Saturday of the month. Ready to pick are the McIntosh, Cortland, Honeycrisp and Galas. Later this season, Macoun, Spencer, Fuij, Empire, Braeburn and Idared will be available.

And there is more coming.

We want to share with Sandisfield and beyond some of the improvements we’ve been working on over the past year.

Most of that work has been outside in the orchard, and we just finished painting the outside of the farmhouse with a fresh coat of white.

The farmhouse, freshly painted. Emily and Calvin bought the historic Riiska Brook Orchard in August 2022.

But with the house, most of our work has been on the inside. We’ve put up new walls and doors and are now hard at work installing a brand-new commercial kitchen. Anyone who has built a commercial kitchen from scratch knows how much planning and effort goes into each piece of the project. We’ve been at it over the past year and are almost ready to turn on the equipment.

Once the new kitchen is up and cooking, we’ll be able to offer fresh homemade donuts.

The donut machine after its complicated setup, almost ready to fry up some fresh cider donuts.

Over time, we plan to install a café setting with food offerings beyond donuts. That dream won't be ready until very likely next summer. We’ve renovated the house so that the first floor includes a seating area to accommodate a café.

More importantly, we’ve been investing in the future of the orchard itself.

We have planted new apple trees to replace ones that were dying, and also planted peach and pear trees. It will be a few years before they produce a crop, but for the peaches, we planted Redhaven, Cresthaven, Glowingstar, and August Rose. For the pears, we planted Harrow Crisp and Harrow Sweet. We’ve also planted raspberry bushes and will have these expanded offerings in years to come.

In total, we've added nearly 100 trees this year and 250 raspberry bushes. We want to keep adding more apples and pears and additional varieties in the near future. Our goal is to be open more of the year with expanded food and produce offerings of many kinds.