The Orchard
- Under the cupola, apples instead of cows; juice instead of milk.
The fields here were all dairy land till about 1960. Then, up to about 1980, this collection of former dairy farms became a fairly typical New Hampshire producer of classic New England hand-packed wholesale McIntosh and Cortland. But cheap imported fresh fruit soon made your local produce department a punishing arena for Northeastern apple growers, no matter how skilled. Time to take Poverty Lane in a bold new direction: backwards.
Now, incorporating new cider orchards on another former dairy farm on Black Hill in Plainfield, NH, this is a twenty-first century fruit farm with a nineteenth-century variety mix. Just like the country before Prohibition, over half our orchards grow weird-tasting cider apples for fermentation. And, just like old-time market growers, we produce a wide range of eating and cooking apples prized for taste and long-keeping. Many of them vanished from general trade when bulk refrigeration and food photography pushed more fragile, more eye-catching varieties into prominence. Some of our favorites are spectacular ‘heirlooms’ and some are just so delicious and grow so well here that they are allowed to be fairly new and not so famous.
So now we have a kind of three-legged effort going here: the Poverty Lane Orchards retail stand, the wholesale fresh packs shipped as “Uncommon Apples,” and of course Farnum Hill Ciders, which we press and ferment in each fall for blending and maturing in winter and release the following year. If Steve time-traveled back 125 years to a big Northeastern apple operation, he could probably live without electricity or tractors and manage all right.
[...] Hill Cider from Poverty Lane Orchards in located in Lebanon New Hampshire where they grow a wide variety of “Uncommon” and [...]