Our Super-Sized Trip To Apple Annie's

Our family loves visiting Apple Annie's, the pick-it-yourself orchard/produce garden in Willcox, Arizona, every fall. Most years, though, we visit in late August or early September, and focus on the seasonal peaches, pears, and peppers. For our trip last year, we even got to dig for potatoes!

This year, we decided to "go the extra mile" with Apple Annie's and visit later in the fall. That way, more varieties of apple would be available in their orchards (usually, only the Criterion apples are ripe enough to be picked in early September...we wanted more variety this time around!). But there were other reasons to visit Apple Annie's in October...like the pumpkin patch! And the corn maze! So we decided to get all our fall harvesting done in one fell swoop...by spending most of the day at Apple Annie's. We'd be ending our Fall Break week with a bang!

When we got to Apple Annie's, we decided to have a quick snack, to give us some energy for the first portion of our day.

Then it was time to head over to the hayride!

Lorelai preferred to sit in the back of the wagon

Look at all those pumpkins out there!

Unlike our trip to the Agua Linda Farm last fall, Apple Annie's had a large, thriving pumpkin patch, with plenty of big healthy pumpkins just waiting to be chopped from the vine. Plus we got our very own shears...

...and friendly staff who helped carry our pumpkins back to the hay wagon. (Not that we NEEDED help, mind you...we're not total wimps. But it was nice of them to provide help all the same!)

The girls with their awesome pumpkins

We enjoyed watching the farmhands chuck the pumpkins on the wagon...

...and off again, once we made it back to the barn!

While Nathan paid for our pumpkins and loaded them into the car, the girls amused themselves by playing in the "corn box"...basically, a huge sandbox with dried-up corn kernels in place of the sand.

 

Making "corn angels"

After swimming through feed corn (yummy!), it was time to try our luck in the corn maze. I was a little nervous about taking the kids through a full-sized corn maze, since they'd never been in one before. But they were so excited that I decided to just "go with it" for a while.

At the entrance to both corn mazes (there was an "intermediate" and an "advanced" maze), employees handed out "clues" to navigating the maze. These clues consisted of knowing how many words were in a certain song, basic math problems, etc. Getting the problems right would ensure you would go in the right direction through the maze. Thanks to these clues, we solved the intermediate maze quite easily. We were flushed with confidence, and after a rest (a too-short rest, as it turned out!), everyone was ready to tackle the advanced maze.

This is all I saw for hours (well, it seemed like hours)

 

This proved to be an...unwise decision. The clues were the same in each maze, but the checkpoints at which the clues needed to be used were much harder to find in the advanced maze. The kids' "buzz" quickly wore off, and was gradually replaced by a feeling of exhausted desperation. More than one of the girls was heard to cry, "We're never going to get out of here!" "I'm THIRSTY," became another common refrain.

But at least the view from the lookout point was great, right?

 

Luckily, with a little patience and a little cheating (we sometimes followed other families who seemed more "confident" than ourselves. We NEVER cut through the corn though; that's for dirty filthy jerks!), we made it back out! The girls were less excited at the exit this time, and more relieved. Maybe if we do this again in the future, we'll do the difficult corn maze first, so the kids won't be so tired out by the end.

After a nice, long rest with lots of water (which I unfortunately had to walk back to the car and get), it was time to head over to the produce gardens and pick some vegetables!

No potatoes to dig for this year, unfortunately! Maybe the farm only plants that crop every few years. But there was still plenty of stuff to choose from. We ended up with about 25 pounds of tomatoes, lots of green bell peppers, jalapeno peppers, medium chile peppers, poblano peppers, cucumbers and spaghetti squash. It was mouth-watering just looking at some of that stuff!

Nice little "photo-op wagon" that the kids took full advantage of while I waited in line...

 

After finally purchasing all our produce (the line was loong, and Nathan had to add some of Apple Annie's jars of salsa to the order), it was 2:30 p.m. And we hadn't had any lunch yet! Time to fix that.

 

We headed over to the Apple Annie's orchard, and had a very late (but tasty!) burger lunch. With pie for dessert. Can't forget the pie...it's divine, and they serve it with a half-pint of ice cream on top! It didn't last long enough to photograph. It felt great to take a load off after walking for hours in the sun. We sat in the shade of some peach trees, munching our food and gathering strength for our last batch of produce-picking...

...in the Granny Smith portion of the orchard! Nathan and I had hoped their Pink Lady apples would be ready to pick, but unfortunately they wouldn't be ripe for another week or two. We love Granny Smith apples too, though, so we weren't too disappointed. After bending over in the warm sun for a couple of hours picking vegetables, standing in a shady orchard yanking low-hanging apples off the tree felt blissfully easy!

 

We got enough apples to fill our lunchboxes for several weeks, and it only took a few minutes of picking! After that, we took a small detour into the general store to buy a couple of extra treats. I picked out some apple pecan honey butter (yum!), and Nathan bought some fudge for the family to share. By now, my muscles were killing me...I admit I was not prepared for the amount of walking that I ended up doing! We were dirty, sweaty, tired, and sore...and very satisfied too.

The girls had fun playing "farmer" on these vintage tractors.

These were exactly the same kinds of tractors as the ones my grandpa used on his farm...

...so it warmed my heart to see the girls sitting atop them.

 

Our home was a welcome sight at the end of the day. I was too tired to cook, so we celebrated our return by eating fudge and cucumber slices for dinner. Very high-class! The next night, we ate some of the spaghetti squash with marinara sauce...the girls loved it. I am so glad they will eat squash for me. The next Monday was (thankfully) a day off work for Nathan, so he was able to watch Aurora while I "took care" of most of the rest of our picked produce...

...I made salsa out of it! We had been running pretty low on our home-prepared salsa, so I'm glad it's all done now. With luck, these jars will probably last us the next year.

So was it worth it to go to Apple Annie's later in the year? Yes and no. Yes, because the weather was gorgeous (it never rose above the low 80s while we were there). It was a genuine pleasure to be outside the whole day in weather like that. Also, the orchards were less stinky (the hot summer sun cooks whatever fruit falls onto the ground) and had fewer flies than in the summer.

On the other hand, the cooler weather meant that the crowds were much larger at both the orchard and the produce garden...but especially the produce garden, due to the corn maze and pumpkin patch being there. It never got unbearably crowded, but there was a lot more waiting in line than we were used to at Apple Annie's. Due to these crowds, there was also a little less produce available, especially in the vegetable gardens. I had to really search for the tomatoes at first!

All in all, I'd say it was a very fun trip, but not one I plan on doing every year. I still love to pick my peaches and pears at Apple Annie's, so that means we might be heading back to the orchard in the late summer next year, and then trying out a pumpkin patch a little closer to home later on. But I can see our family re-visiting Apple Annie's in October again at some future point...it really put us in the mood for fall!