Hillcrest Orchards

I spent a wonderful Sunday here! You can get a massive grocery bag of apples for $ 12. I have been eating mine for weeks. I have never had apples that tasted this good! They have a hayride that runs every 15 min and takes you to the part of the orchard where you can pick apples. They had quite a few varieties that were all clearly labeled. I highly recommend this farm if you are looking to get out in the sunshine for a few hours. Very relaxing.

Had a great time apple picking here, but that’s not the only attraction. There are also a couple cool little places to get some apple themed food and treats. I recommend the Lake Erie perch tacos finished off with fresh apple cinnamon doughnut. There is a hayride to drop you off at the orchard which has a few varieties to pick from. Round all this out with a corn maze, pumpkin patch and a farmers market to make you day complete.

Our favorite apple orchard! We have come here 4 years in a row and are never disappointed!

This was such a disappointing experience. We headed to Hillcrest Orchard on a perfect autumn day, looking forward to the corn maze and finding fresh apples. I had read the extensive list of apples they grown on their website, and was pretty excited about the wide variety. The parking lot was packed when we got there, but the place is so big that it really didn’t feel crowded once we were walking around. The young lady in the check-​in shed gave us the gist of things, and pointed us down a path toward the corn maze and orchard. She had mentioned a hay ride, but we didn’t see any tractor and there were several other people walking, so we started walking down the path. It was a beautiful day as I mentioned, and part of the reason we were there was to get a little outdoor exercise.
It really wasn’t clear where the corn maze was. There were pictures hanging in the check-​in shed that made it look gigantic, but the only corn field that we passed was quite small, and the corn wasn’t even waist high. We all agreed that this surely couldn’t be the corn maze, and we kept walking. We got to the u-​pick apple area, and saw an older woman sitting at a table with the bags that you use to pick the apples. When we approached her, the first thing she said was «where did you come from??» and it just went downhill from there. She berated us (six adults) for not riding in on the hay cart, and told us that she didn’t even want to give us the bags to pick our apples because we hadn’t done it «the right way.» The six of us looked at each other like we were in a skit from Saturday Night Live. This nasty old lady continued her tirade but finally, begrudgingly, gave us some bags (after one of us explained that we had simply followed the path we had been pointed to, as many other people had done,) but not without an enormous amount of attitude. We all wanted to just leave at that point.
I asked another group of people there where the corn maze was, and sure enough, it was the sad little field we had already passed. There are only four or five different varieties of apples to choose from in the u-​pick area, only two of which were palatable. The golden delicious are excellent. The red delicious are passable. The cortlands were mealy and I really don’t remember the others. You can buy honeycrisp, but only in the «farm store,» for $ 25 per bag. I would recommend this place to you if you are into paying admission to go pick your own apples, which you then also pay for, and being yelled at for no apparent reason. I will never go back. There is another corn maze/​U-​pick pumpkin place that is excellent (and the pumpkins are $ 1/​each instead of $ 3 something a pound like they are at Hillcrest) nearby, so there is absolutely no need to deal with the awful customer service and poorly executed corn maze that are at Hillcrest.

I’m so upset that we got rained out (and yes, we waited for almost an hour in the car just in case the rain stopped) and we couldn’t really partake of the «picking» from this adorable orchard. What happened instead was that we paid 4 bucks to take a hay ride to the back of the orchard (about a 5 min ride; I can’t really tell distance because I’m not sure how fast a tractor goes) and then back again because it started pouring! Oh well, we should have looked at the forecast. But there were plenty of people there, so it wasn’t only us dummies.
Anyway, after we realized that the rain wasn’t going to stop, we got a pumpkin, a teeny pumpkin for Lorelei, a butternut squash, and two bags of apples. So far, they have gotten rave reviews. The squash yielded the best soup I’ve ever made of this type (uh, yeah, it really does pay to get ‘em from a farm instead of Giant Eagle). I made apple crisp and apple pancakes with the apples, and there’s still half of both bags left! Hmmm… baked apples next? I’m also going to try my hand at pumpkin pie from scratch, because last time I used pumpkin to make something (soup) it was a jack-​o-​lantern and even though it tasted good, I am looking forward to using a real «pie pumpkin» (smaller) for this project.
I would recommend this orchard even though we didn’t get the full experience of picking. It was really friendly, had a playground for kids and a cute little market out front. We will be back!