U-Picking at Rittman Orchards

Hello all!  Hello Fall! 

This season brings all sorts of goodies along with cool weather: pumpkins, apple picking, cider, and my personal favorite, caramel apples.  We typically sell out of these delightful treats by the end of each day, but if I am lucky, I get to take one home.  🙂  Abbie won’t eat them because the apples are dipped with the skin on.  “Kin, Mama, it yucky.” Oh well, more for me! 

So, this newsletter is going to be primarily about our U-pick apples. I know I touched on it a little in my last email, but I have a correction to make and more information to provide.

I have to make a correction to what I wrote about coming back in the store to add more apples when you are finished u-picking.  Due to the Covid situation and the need to limit the amount of customers in the store, I need to amend that statement.  We are NOT going to allow u-pickers to finish filling their bags in the store this year.  We are so sorry about this, but it will prevent longer lines and help with the traffic flow. I apologize for the misinformation in the previous email.  

As with berry picking, we are going to do our best to enforce social distancing and mask-wearing while interacting with our staff during this fall season.  Please respect our request to provide the safest environment we can for our customers.  We are happy to be able to host an outdoor fall activity for families during this difficult time, but we have to make sure we keep everyone on our property safe.

This really bears repeating: apple season is our BUSY season.  Our really busy season.  On the weekends, don’t be shocked if you see a line forming OUTSIDE our store.  Because of the agricultural nature of our business AND the square footage of our store, we are only allow to have 17 people in our store at one time during this time of Covid restrictions!  Therefore, we will have staff members keeping tracking of people in and out of the store at all times. Our store was not designed for lines forming outside the building, so please be careful as the line spills out into the parking lot. 🙁 

One way around this issue…if you are not coming to pick apples, you can always order curb-side pick-up.  You can do this online by clicking here. I would personally not recommend coming to pickup your order on Saturday or Sunday because we will be swamped.  But that’s just a suggestion! 

We can’t predict the crowds, but we are assuming this coming weekend (9/26-27) will be very busy.  If it gets SUPER SUPER busy, we will limit the number of people from each group who come into the store.  We might have to go down to ONE PERSON PER GROUP.  We don’t see a way around this if we have a line of customers winding around our parking lot.  We want to make your experience here as efficient and pleasant as possible. 

We are learning as we go this year! 

A few other notes:  Pumpkin U-Pick will ONLY be on the weekends starting September 26th. Pumpkins are $.40/pound.  The next apples coming up in the store soon are Cortland and Jonagold.

Please be patient with us as we navigate how this season works with large crowds and Covid limitations! And please know, we deeply appreciate your patronage. Thank you so much for your interest in our farm. Stay safe out there!

-Amanda & Chris

The Fun Stuff!

We just got a huge order in from Melissa & Doug! They have fabulous toys and books.  Now that some children are spending more time at home, I tried to order some more educationally geared toys/activities.  These toys make great gifts.  Abbie is obsessed with the Water Wow! activity books.  For those of you with toddlers, they are the BEST for car rides!