We headed out to Washington County this week to catch up with Dan Wilson, owner of Hicks Orchard in Granville, and find out a bit more about the orchard we all know and love. We chatted about his beginnings in the business, what’s new in the orchard and in the barn, and of course, their famous cider donuts.
How did you get into the business?
Kind of sideways, actually. My parents were not farmers. My dad was the head of research and development for General Foods down in White Plains in the ‘70s. We lived in Connecticut then, and we moved up here just as I started high school. My parents purchased the orchard in the mid ’70s.
My parents always had an open door to me. It wasn’t like they expected me to take this over. It took me years of traveling and working in other places, often coming back here for apple season to decide if I wanted to land here. And I did.
I learned the business by their example, more than anything else. I studied art and psychology in school. There's a lot of opportunities for creativity and art in this kind of environment, designing labels for example, and a lot of ways of study psychology, too. So that all comes into play.
I learned horticulture from the folks at Cornell. I encourage extension agents to do as much work as they can here because I learned from them … and I have the best eyes in the state on my crop that way, too.
It's hard to believe I've been doing this for decades, but that's how time goes.
I love what I do. I think this year, probably more than I have in a long time. We've pared down in staff which puts me in touch with the very fundamental parts of the orchard. For example, I pruned all the trees this year. I made the cider. And though small, we have a really superlative crew, so this year has just been great.
Dan Wilson
We love what you do, too! I’ve been coming to Hicks every year since I was a kid. You must hear that all the time.
Thank you. We have a great community. Really good people. I just feel really appreciative to be part of a family’s fall tradition. I did a lot of theater when I was a kid. And so, in some ways, I feel like my job is a stage manager. I'm creating this platform for people to have an experience with their families, which is really rich. We’ve even had people propose in the orchard, so this becomes kind of a part of the fabric of people's lives.
I also think there's this kind of visceral quality of how gratifying it is to go to a place and and pick the food from the tree. That is so fundamental. And an experience that is hard to replace.
How is this year’s crop looking?
We have a superlative crop this year, which is a bit of a surprise given that it's been a really dry summer. We have nice fruit, good quality, and good size. And and most varieties that people really like are pretty strong. Of course, we’re also making donuts and a lot of fresh cider, and if I can keep enough hard cider on the shelves, we'll have a good supply of that too.
Tell us more about the orchard itself!
We have around 12,000 trees, and we continue to plant new trees. We are sadly taking out some of the oldest trees in our orchards, that are now over 100 years old, because the trees are kind of falling apart. They're also a lot harder to take care of. When I'm out in the orchard pruning in the winter, it’s the difference between pruning a little tree with hand clippers versus working with a chainsaw. It's really a difference between horticulture and forestry.
I have this relationship with these trees that have been here for generations before me, so it's really kind of heartbreaking to make that transition. However, these new trees that we’re planting are some exciting varieties and some are coming into production now. It's a little bit of a learning curve working with trellised apple trees that look more like vineyards than orchards, but that's the transition farms go through.
What’s it been like for you navigating this season in the midst of a pandemic?
Well, this is our 115th u-pick apple season here on the farm. It's interesting because you think about all the historical events that have transpired in the last 115 years, including another pandemic. We got through that, and so we're figuring out how best to navigate this.
I think we’re seeing a little bit of a benefit from the fact that there haven't been too many other things for people to be able to do. There's a fair amount of mourning for the fact that there was no Washington County Fair or Balloon Festival. So people are looking for opportunities to get out, and coming to pick apples outdoors should be pretty correctly perceived to be a low risk kind of activity.
We’ve built a program to be as safe as we possibly can. One of the things we're doing this year, which is new, is that we're offering a couple of midweek incentives for people to come out. Partly because we feel like we're plugged into this community in a in a pretty significant way. And for everything that's going on in this country, the effort to rebuild community, I think is an important one. So we’d like to play a little part in that by by giving back to senior citizens, since they kind of brought us here. So Tuesdays are our senior discount days and we're offering 10% off apples, either picked or u-pick, and fresh cider and donuts.
On Wednesdays, we're creating the same offer for the broad category of essential workers, which includes health care and emergency workers, but also active military and teachers, so they get the same 10% discount.
On Thursdays and Fridays, we're open an hour later and we’ll be firing up our pizza oven. Again, we’re offering these incentives and additional hours partly to give back, but also to encourage people to come during the week to help us decompress the number of people here on weekends a little bit.
Other than the pandemic, what are some of the other challenges you face at the orchard?
We're super dependent on the weather. And we've been really lucky this year. It was such a dry summer. But then we got the tail end of a hurricane that came through and in one day dumped four inches of rain. It wasn't all at once. It was a long all day rain, which is perfect and the one reason we have apples of significant size.
We got lucky with that. But there's so many ways that we can be unlucky, right? I'm never confident about our crop until I see somebody with a bag of apples, that they've already paid for, walking down to the car. Because so many things can go wrong up to that point. But right now, we're in the middle of a great season. We've seen good times and challenging times, and have negotiated those.
We can’t not ask about the cider donuts, because they are hands-down our favorite!
Well, it's because of the superlative cider that goes into them! And the fact that we use a lot of cider in every batch of doughnuts. We have a great mix that we've never changed. We've only tinkered with it up to the point of creating a maple glazed version this past spring. We'll have them again later when it cools off a little bit. We're experimenting with a pumpkin spice version, too.
Having something like the donuts that is a weatherproof part of our business is a wonderful thing.
What’s next for Hicks?
Starting a couple years ago, we experimented with being open through the winter. It's a challenge, because we don't have heat in the barn, but people responded well, so we do plan to be open year-round on weekends.
We’re also growing the store as a hub of other local producers like cheeses, honey, and syrup. We've done that for a long time, but we're really working to be kind of a central purveyor of local products that people can come to one place to purchase. One of the great things that has come out of the pandemic is a greater desire to support local business, and this is another way to do that.
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