Agri - Culture

This weekend was what I believe will become an annual tradition for me and mine: Pick Fest. The way I came to discover this little gem was through a new favorite local band, Foxhound. I fell in love with their folksy sound when they were featured on a radio program, but I was disturbed to find that they had no recorded tunes available for purchase. The saving grace was that they would be playing again at a local orchard in a few months. I had forgotten entirely about this until I saw it advertised with tickets at a low low price of ten dollars, and realized that I could also pick my own apples while at this outdoor folk fest concert! While we talked it over, imagining what it might be like, some thoughts came up: Would they be picking through our bags to find our smuggled food items? Would there be pick pockets among the crowd? Perhaps they would be pickling the apples for $5 a jar?



When we arrived, it was even better than I had expected. A shuttle took us to the top of a large hill where we were surrounded on all sides by many different varieties of small apple trees. Winesap, Johnathan, Rome, Golden Delicious - they're all here! People milled through the rows with big baskets hanging off their shoulders and tried not to twist their ankles on the fallen apples hiding in the grass. In the middle of all this, food and drink and hippie tapestry vendors flanked a big area filled with straw and bales for sitting. A red truck bed formed the stage where the musicians picked banjos, maneuvered fiddles, and tooted into jugs. An unruly bunch of two-year-olds tossed themselves around in the straw in front of the stage, making giant nests and jumping into them, throwing bits of straw into each others' faces, and mashing their own fashionable fall caps into saucers while their parents enjoyed hard cider a few yards away.

We managed to get a recording of Foxhound via a small portable device stealthily placed on the truck bed. The other bands were great also - Vinegar Creek Constituency and Manatawny Creek Ramblers. See a theme in these folk band names? In the midst of much toe-tapping and hand-clapping, we ate an apple dumpling, three kinds of cheeses, crackers, and hot apple cider with the sweet smell of the day all around us. One break we took from the music found us among the trees, picking the best apples for a sauce that I would can the next day. There's just something about homemade applesauce picked, cooked, and canned by hand in the course of a chilly fall weekend.