Come Pick the Last Apples & Sprouts of 2020; Farewell to the Farm Season & Dear Farm Friends.

– SUMMARY –

Farm is now open self-serve 7 days a week 9:00 to 5:00 • Pick the last Mutsu APPLES and cut your own SPROUTS • GOODIES at the stand = apples & cider jugs every day; cider slushees & hot spiced cider on weekend • COVID rules include (1) Keep SAFE distance, (2) wear MASK in closer quarters, (3) monitor your KIDS, (4) BYOBags for picking produce • Drive slowwwwly on the farm • Thank you for being the kindest ‘Creekniks

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DEAR FARMKETEERS: Leave it to you – our brilliant and dedicated corps of locavores – to turn the WORST. YEAR. EVER. into the BEST. SEASON. EVER. This weekend we invite you to come pick the last mutsus and sprouts, and say farewell to the farm til next year. If there are a few remaining straggler apples to pick after the weekend, we might announce it on Facebook and Instagram instead of sending a Fresh Crop Alert. Thank you all for supporting local farms. Be well.

Pick your own Mutsu apples. Mutsu is the annual orchard finale – and a delicious, versatile, delightful apple. It is an excellent dessert apple, and makes first-rate juice, pie, and sauce. Mutsus will not shrivel when stored, and they hold flavor through winter. Come pick the last pomes of the year.

Cut your own Brussels sprouts. These massively nutritious spheroids of cruciferous crunchings are your best food-friend in late autumn. Cut a fresh stalk yourself, pop off the sprouts, chop in half, stir fry with bacon or facon. Please cut the whole stalk, not individual sprouts.

Get sweet cider jugs for winter. This is the 11th – and possibly final – week of “Orchard Ambrosia,” our 100% unpasteurized, old-fashioned, nothing-added cider. You can get gallon and half-gallon jugs. It’s just apples and maybe a few pears, cold-pressed into juice. Freezes great, just drain off a little to keep the bottle from going kaboom in the freezer.

Today we say farewell to a great farm year, and a great Farm Friend, Robert, who passed away of cancer. From making delightful signs to wrangling spreadsheets of fruit tree data and all sorts of odd tasks in between, Robert was “the man” and a pleasure to have on the farm. He landed at The ‘Creek in 2017 upon returning to the USA after a teaching appointment in Poland.

Robert’s memorable signage – the famous “Produce Portal” and “Heirloom Clock” and other quirky guideposts around the farm – are now part of ‘Creek lore. Maybe these remind us to think about portals to other universes, and the longevity of trees versus human machines, a farmy meditation on deep space and deep time.

Seeing Robert walk through the orchard with his daughter, Grace, even as the disease made a simple walk very difficult, inspired all of us at the farm. Robert fought valiantly and with purpose.

November 1 would have been Robert’s 56th birthday. We all miss him. We miss his bread baking, his story telling, and his ever-so-dapper attire, fitting for the “Old Spice” model that we always imagined him to be in another life. Thank you, Robert.

This season we also said farewell to the gentlest giant of a fluffball farm dog. Zorro brought joy to THOUSANDS of u-pickers who encountered him in his usual posture – napping in the orchard – or ambling ever-so-leisurely to say hello to visitors with an “arfy woof.”

Zorro was a living poem. He was the 4-pawed, 130-pound embodiment of Walt Whitman’s celebrated line, “I lean and loafe at my ease… observing a spear of summer grass.” Now Zorro has flown to his mythical wintry mountain home atop the Pyrenees. Thank you for being with us, Zorro.