Visit to Century Farm Orchards and More Apple Trees!

Yesterday morning Jon, Sarah, and I went to the Century Farm Orchards Open House in Reidsville, NC. Their open house is every Saturday in November and February each year. This is a priceless and lovely family ran orchard that specializes in heritage varieties of apple trees. We signed the guest register when we first arrived. There were visitors from Georgia and South Carolina. We had no idea this was such a big deal. There were quite a few people there.

There were over 100 varieties of apples on display. We had heard of very few of them. We were able to taste test many varieties and sampled their apple cider. Over the course of the time we were there, I believe Sarah may have drank her weight in apple cider. We were taking notes on the varieties we liked. Bill even mentioned making “good” cider requires crab apples. We were immediately intrigued. We have an ornamental crab apple tree that we made jelly from. It was tasty, but those tiny crab apples were a test for the ole patience. He showed us a few varieties of crab apples that were golf ball size. We honestly did not know crab apples could be so big! I guess what we were used to seeing is the various ornamental crab apples. When we asked Bill for some suggested crab apple varieties for cider he deferred us to Anne who was nearby giving instruction on all things apple. We learned a lot of information on the history of certain apple varieties.

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