Apple season is here

Sep. 1—Doe Creek Farms of Pembroke, Va. is a historical apple orchard that is now open again for apple picking season.

Owner Georgia Haverty is very excited for this season because of how full the trees are this year and says this year is a good one for the apples.

"This is a very good year where the last two years haven't been as good because of freezes and stuff like that," said Haverty.

Doe Creek has six-and-a-half acres of apple trees on the property with 20 different varieties to choose from. Haverty not only has the apples as pick-your-own but also makes several different apple products with them.

"I make apple butter, jelly, cider, chutney, and syrup," she said.

The apples are all sold by the pound, while the rest of the products are all set prices.

The farm is actually a designated historic site as it has been around for quite a while.

"The apples have been growing here since the 1800s," said Haverty. "We came in 1978, so we're pretty new."

She added, "We had a commercial orchard until 2011 when I pulled out all the old trees and replaced them with these dwarf trees that we have now. I started selling these apple in 2013 or 14, something like that, and they don't get any bigger."

Haverty's parents are actually the ones who first bought Doe Creek Farms in 1978 because they were originally from Loudon County in northern Virginia where they owned another farm, but they found that area had grown to crowded and expensive for them.

"This is the farm they found and it happened to have apples on it, so we learned how to take care of them," she said.

The couple ran the farm for many years, but later on Haverty's daughter actually moved to the farm before she did in order to help out. Haverty moved a year after her daughter once she retired from her government job.

"Forty years ago I was selling cider out of Blacksburg, my mom was selling it here in the grassy area, my then-husband did the whole sale stuff, and my dad worked on the machinery," said Haverty.

When the orchard was doing commercial business, they had 100 acres of apple trees, but that just got to be too much.

"The maintenance just got to be too much work to handle," said Haverty. "We have to prune these trees every year, and to prune the old ones, we needed a group of like 15 people all winter just to prune. We also had big pruning machines that we also used, but we just couldn't do that anymore."

Haverty also said she felt that trying to compete with other wholesale companies was just not worth the trouble and that they really enjoy keeping the work local.

"It's a lot easier to maintain, and the profit margin is a lot better than when we had the commercial orchard," she said. "With commercial orchards, you're kind of fighting again wholesale prices from the west coast and China and everywhere else, so this is now local instead."

Haverty added, "It's now pick your own and totally retail. I don't have to have a big group of people, and I prune them now. I have a couple kids that come and help me that I'm teaching to prune."

Though she does almost all of the work with the apples, Haverty is not alone on the property. Her daughter and son-in-law also live there and run the other businesses they have at Doe Creek.

Haverty's daughter, Allison Hollopter runs a dog kennel, restaurant, and wedding venue along with her husband.

"I have no part in running the other stuff, but my daughter runs the restaurant which used to be an old sheep barn," said Haverty. "I built it, and she runs it. Same thing with the event thing. I renovated this building (the old pack house), and she runs weddings and events out of it."

Haverty only does the apple part of the farm because of all of the work that goes into taking care of them.

"I sell them for around seven or eight weeks, then as soon as that's done around the end of October, I prune them all the way until March, then I spray them all the way through August," she said. "I mow, do weed control, and just keep up maintenance."

It's a lot of work for her, so it keeps her busy. Plus, she enjoys letting her daughter have her own thing with the family farm business.

This is actually going to be the last year they do weddings at Doe Creek Farm due to a few reasons.

"We've done weddings for 10 years here, but this is the last year we'll be doing them," said Haverty.

She said they are not going to be using the wedding venue building for the apple sales because as of now she sells them from the porch of that building, and she also mentioned that she may eventually let other vendors work out of there with her while she sells the apples but has not decided anything about that yet.

The restaurant called the Bad Apple is a fairly new addition to the farm as it opened in November of 2019, but it has been pretty popular.

"It's like a speakeasy on the inside, so when you go in, it's like a '20s or '30s theme," said Haverty.

The restaurant is a dinner-only eatery with locally made alcohol too.

"We have different alcohol from distilleries and wineries in Virginia," she said.

"Ten years is a long time to do weddings and there are a lot of venues out there now, so we just decided to stop hosting them," Haverty said.

She added, "There's also a dog kennel that used to be our migrant quarters where the pickers would stay back in the day. It was going to get torn down, so my daughter and son-in-law turned it into a dog kennel."

Haverty said they've changed the business from just having the apples, but she thinks they are doing a good job maintaining it all.

The orchard is also a very popular place among the locals because for many, they grew up with it and it gives them another option for family outings.

"For the community, I'd say it's some place to go. They all love the apple orchard, in fact, I grow a few varieties just for them," said Haverty.

Golden Grimes is the favorite among the locals which Haverty has two rows of in the orchard.

"They love coming up here because they remember it before even we bought it, and it's just sort of a local thing here," she said." Many came when they were in grade school and now bring their children and grandchildren."

The farm used to do field trips that showed off the pack house where all of the work on the apples was done, which is the wedding venue now, and she still does them now; however, since the pack house is not operational anymore, the trips are a bit different.

"I have them come up here and talk to them about the apples and look around at the farm, and they seem to love it still," said Haverty.

Haverty said that she and her daughter really love the farm and the fact that they get to live and work there, and they want to continue to keep it in the family for as long as possible.

The orchard is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday through Monday at 412 Doe Creek Farm Road in Pembroke.

The orchard does not take credit cards, but you can also find more information about prices, which apples are available for picking, the Bad Apple, the dog kennel, and the wedding venue on their website at doecreekfarm.com.

— Contact Kassidy Brown at kbrown@bdtonline.com.