Wild Apple Farms

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Strawberry Festival Saturday, June 20th!
Join us for our annual celebration of strawberry season at the Chelsea Farmers Market. 🍓

Chelsea Farmers Market today. A gorgeous day!

We've got our very own Fairy Door at the Farm Shop, and will be participating in the Dexter Fairy Door Trail and Midsummer's Celebration!

Mossy, magical, and earthy. Come see what the farm and woodland fairies have been up to overnight! All things flowery, herbal, wild and old fashioned (of course!)

There will be iced bottles of Lemonade and Spring Water, with Midsummer Fairy Nibbles on July 17th all day at the shop as well! ☀✨✨✨

Sold out two hours into Market!

I love baking bread and watching others enjoy it. 🙂💛

Crabapples, apples, pies, and honeybees in America.

When the English colonists arrived in "North America," they found only crab apples. Crab apple trees were the only native apples to the area.

By the 1640s orchards were much more common, and the importation of honeybees (initially in 1622 from England to Virginia) helped with pollination and thus crop output. These fruits were called melt-in-the-mouth or winter banana.

Later on in 1737, Robert Prince established the first commercial apple tree nursery called William Prince Nursery in Flushing, New York. The British who occupied Long Island during the Revolutionary War considered the nursery so important that they put an armed guard around it for protection. The nursery survived under four generations of the Prince family until just after the Civil War.

And for those foodies, here's a very short, if slightly nebulous, recipe from "American Cookery" (1796) by Amelia Simmons.

"Stew and strain the apples, to every three pints, grate the peal of a fresh lemon, add cinnamon, mace, rose-water and sugar to your taste—and bake in paste No. 3. Every species of fruit such as peas, plums, raspberries, black berries may be only sweetned, without spices—and bake in paste No. 3."