Concord is home to not one but two great pick-your-own apple farms, each with similar but different offerings. Going by proximity to Insider headquarters, we’ll begin with Apple Hill Farm, which is only about 3 minutes away from our building (making it a convenient spot to pop into for a snack) at 580 Mountain Road.
Apple Hill has everything you’d expect – lots of apples, and a big hill. Apart from the obvious, though, the farm also offers pick-your-own peaches in a number of varieties, which will still be available for another couple weeks or so. If you don’t have time to pick anything yourself, you can always just go into the farmstand and shop for things like pies, cookies, cider (regular and hard), jams, jellies, tomatoes (gigantic ones), assorted baked goods, cheeses and, you guessed it, apples.
If you’ve been to Apple Hill before, you probably think you’ve got the place all figured out and you know all there is to know about it. But if you haven’t been in yet this year, there’s some new stuff you should know about.
For starters, Apple Hill now grows its own grapes. They’re not available for you to pick your own just yet, but you can get some inside the store. If you want to try something different – and absolutely delicious – check out the Thomcord grapes. This breed is a cross between Concord and Thompson seedless grapes, resulting in a Concord grape taste without any seeds. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you can eat a whole bundle of them.
If you’re a hard cider fan, you’ll be happy to see cans of Farnum Hill hard cider for sale in the cooler, also new this year. Farnum Hill is based in West Lebanon, and they make some high-end craft cider that packs a punch – 6.5 percent for the canned farmhouse variety and 7.5 percent for the bottled extra dry variety.
If you’re looking way ahead, you can plan on coming back in three to five years to try what will then be a new crop of a new type of apple, the evercrisp. This spring they planted several rows of the variety, which is a descendant of honeycrisp – honeycrisp apple trees have a tendency to produce very little fruit every other year, owner Diane Souther said, so the evercrisps should do better year after year.
Of course, apples are the star here, and honeycrisp, mac and gala apples will all be ripe and ready for picking by the time you read this. For a complete picking schedule, recipes, directions and more general information, go to applehillfarmnh.com.
