J Williams is the orchard guide at Ya Ya Farm and Orchard, a pick-your-own facility on the outskirts of Longmont. Her job is to orient amateur apple pickers before releasing them to frolic unsupervised among the rows of trees. The work keeps her busy; groups come through on 15-minute intervals, and every single timeslot is filled.
As part of her standard spiel, Williams beseeches customers to go easy on the trees.
“We gently stress that you gently twist the apple,” she tells them. “Pulling can damage the bloom for next year. So, if it doesn’t come right away, move on to the next apple.”
On a gloriously sun-kissed morning earlier this month, she offered this instruction to three generations of the Dziubla clan – 3 kids along with their parents and grandparents – who were eagerly waiting to be dispatched to the orchard.
“The kids love to apple-pick,” said the mom, Carly Dziubla. “There aren't very many places in Colorado to do that.”
Williams detained them long enough to give them the lay of the land.
“Down here, we’ve got Golden Delicious, and Honeycrisp. Another Macintosh tree,” she told them, waving her hand in the general direction of the densest part of the orchard.
And off they went into the trees.
Eight-year-old Gabe Dziubla had grand ambitions for the day.
“We're gonna make an apple pie!” he exclaimed, galloping next to his parents.
“I just like trying to climb the trees - seeing if apples were ready,” said his sister Evie, who, at eleven, felt her height gave her a distinct apple-picking advantage over her younger siblings.
As the kids ran, absolutely delighted, from apple-laden tree to apple-laden tree, their mom, Carly, confided that this picture of breezy, autumnal wholesomeness took some serious Type-A planning on her part.
“The first year we did it, we didn't get a spot,” Ms. Dziubla said. “So now I make a reservation in January.”
Meanwhile, up by the parking lot, Longmont resident Mary Pacini was more like the rest of us. She did not book an apple picking outing 8 full months in advance. And she was out of luck.
Orchard worker Kiowa Stetson was trying to let her down easy.
“We’re a small orchard. We’re eight acres” Stetson said. “We try to meet as much of the demand as possible so everyone can pick.”
Pacini seemed to understand.
“I've tried the last three years and every time it's too late. It's already full,” she said. “This year I just decided, even if we can't pick the fruit, we're going to come because we've been wanting to come for so long.”
Instead, she stocked up at the farmstand while her daughter picked flowers and entertained herself with the donkeys and chickens.
Boulder resident Paul King and his family were among the lucky few who did make it into the orchard that morning. He credited his wife’s foresight in reserving their spot at the start of the year.
“This was difficult to get a reservation,” he said. “It's like a coveted, momentous occasion to come here and pick apples. So, this is the culmination of a lot of luck and hard work. And, you know, it's all worth it just to be able to pick that Honeycrisp from the very top branch.”
Angie Lee, of Fort Collins, had a similar experience. Apple picking was a family tradition when she was growing up in Canada. But when she wanted to share that with her children in Colorado, she found out it was necessary to plan way ahead.
“It was extremely hard. I've been trying for a few years and every year I miss it,” she said. “I started probably in December or January. And this year for the first time in probably three or four years, I got it. So, it was a mission.”
Enthusiasm for apple picking has never been bigger in Northern Colorado. For some people, it's nostalgia for an East Coast or Midwestern childhood. For others, it's the Instagram Effect – they’ve swiped through enough alluring images of apple-picking on social media and are itching to post some of their own. But whatever the draw, most would-be apple pickers come to discover that nabbing a spot at a You-Pick orchard is not for the faint of heart.
Supply and Demand
When Ya Ya's Owner Sharon Perdue bought the farm in 2003, she had no intention of turning the place into the pick-your-own extravaganza it is today. The property had only a handful of vintage apple trees left over from an historic 1930’s-era orchard. But people soon started asking her if they could come and pick, so she went along with it, planted hundreds more trees and began inviting the public in to pick their own apples in 2007.
As the popularity of the orchard took off, she turned to a reservation system to manage the crowds.
“Each year, more and more people definitely want to do the activity,” Perdue said. “I do it first come first serve. Where it kind of gets tricky is just what nature's going to throw at us. I'm only human and I'm guessing how many apples are going to actually make it to the end.”
If people find it hard to get a spot, Perdue said, it’s simply a matter of demand versus supply.
“Pretty simply, there's way more demand than there's supply,” she said.
Supply is even tighter this year, after a late spring freeze took out several other local orchards. Ya Ya’s received close to 5,000 reservation requests this year for what will likely shake out to about 2,000 slots.
According to Perdue, there's good reason for the shortage: apple farming is a risky proposition in Northern Colorado, where summers are brutally hot and dry and the growing season brutally short. An ill-timed freeze – not uncommon in Northern Colorado – can kill off a year’s crop in the spring, or entire trees in the fall.
“If I have a crop that produces 50%, I consider it a success,” she said. “There's not another crop that a farmer would raise and consider half a crop success. And in this climate - it's not the best climate for apple trees. So why would you do that?”
Regional challenges for pick-your-own orchards
If opportunities for Front Range apple picking are slim, Colorado State University Ag Economist Dawn Thilmany says it’s also because opportunities for Front Range orchards are disappearing.
“For most of the urban corridor farms, there's nowhere to expand to,” said Thilmany. “We're just losing agricultural land. And it's got the highest development pressure near urban areas where you’d exactly put a U-pick farm.”
Even when orchards can find suitable land for expansion, new apple trees take a long time to get established, so the market can’t respond rapidly to increasing demand.
“It’s a huge time investment to get those trees,” Perdue said. “You plant a tree – it’s five to seven years until you get fruit.”
And while orchards can charge a premium for the U-pick experience, Thilmany said many shy away from the model. It comes with its own costs and liabilities, like extra insurance requirements, potential damage to the trees and the higher crop waste that’s inevitable when you let amateurs pick the fruit.
“My other option would be to make it be a wholesale orchard and I would just hire people to pick, and I'd wholesale out,” Perdue said. “Either way it kind of cost-wise comes out the same when I run the numbers.”
She sticks with the U-Pick model because she’s touched by the joy it seems to bring her customers. But most farmers don't have the skillset to run a hospitality business.
“Farmers are really, really good at production, but didn't necessarily go to school or get training for customer service. And it is a whole other industry,” Thilmany said. “If you do it well you really do have to manage crowds. Everybody wants to do the apple picking on the same four Saturdays in the fall when the weather's pretty.”
The pretty weather is certainly part of the draw for the apple picking Dziubla family, at Ya Ya Farm and Orchard. After about 20 minutes dashing about the trees, eight-year-old Gabe was ready to declare their mission accomplished.
“We're done with apple picking?” he asked his parents.
“I think so.” His mom replied, cradling a paper sack overflowing with fruit - more than enough for that pie.
Before leaving, Gabe asserted his right to one last autumn treat on the way out.
“Now can we go get an apple donut?” he asked.
