2008 Forecast

Welcome to the 2008 Fall Season at Thompson’s Cider Mill & Orchard

Another cider and apple season – our 32nd – will kick off on Saturday, September 20. This year Thanksgiving is nearly a week later than last year, and as a result the final weekend for the mill to be open will be November 29 and 30.

In general there will be a good crop of apples this year, although the early reports on the highly popular Honey Crisp variety is that they may be in shorter supply than last year. We will have to see how that unfolds. Most other varieties should be readily available.

It will come as no surprise that since last year the costs of operating the orchard and the mill have gone up as has everything else. Fuel, spray materials, packaging, cider jugs, you name it, have all had sharp price hikes. We will endeavor to limit any price adjustments.

Our orchard got a major haircut (aka, pruning) last winter under the expert hands of Alan Haigh, owner of the Home Orchard Company. He spent more than a week in the icy cold of February shaping all of the trees in the orchard, and the results were impressive. Although it is difficult to tell now when the trees are in full foliage, I can attest to the great job that he did to properly shape some very unruly trees. This is the second consecutive year that Alan has done a major pruning and it sets the orchard up well for future years when less radical pruning should be needed.

In terms of cider operations, our Cider Sure system that we were required to install last year proved to be very manageable once we got used to using it. We could discern no change in the flavor of the cider which was our major concern.

We will continue with our tradition of making cider on Saturday mornings beginning at about 10 am and finishing up around 12 noon. As in the past, visitors are welcome to watch. One caveat is that if the hornets (yellow jackets) are extremely bad as they tend to be on a couple of the early weekends when it is still very warm outside, we may choose to make cider Friday night so as to avoid attracting quite so many of these very annoying autumnal characters when the mill is open.

As part of our fall traditions we will have a nice selection of pumpkins available beginning around October 11 and continuing through Halloween.

We also will once again feature high quality apple and pumpkin pies throughout the season as well as pumpkin and apple breads and muffins.

Finally, a few words about apple picking. We do not allow public picking in our orchard because we do not have sufficient parking. Apple picking takes time. Having cars parked for long periods of time consumes too much of our parking space and makes it difficult for us to use our tractors to shift bins of apples around as part of our cider making. We understand the attraction of picking your own apples and are happy to provide directions to several large orchards in the region that can properly handle public picking.

We look forward to seeing old friends and new once again this autumn.

Sincerely,


Geoff Thompson