Rosabella's Orchard

After having such a great time at the Jonamac farm in Malta, IL, I got a bug up my butt about finding something similarly fun here in WA. Given that WA is a huge apple producer, I thought it would be a piece of cake to find an similar orchard around here! *sigh*...but I precisely forgot that this is WA. What does that mean? Two things really:

1. Most of the orchards are on the other side of the Cascades which translates to a minimum 2-3 hour drive. Some are as far as 7 hours away.
2. Anything around this side of the mountains is tiny and pretty much limited to apple picking only. No petting zoos, no silos filled with dried corn, etc.

That's ok tho. The primary thing was to get apples, and boy did we get apples!! :D We drove up to the Skagit Valley (where the tulips are in the spring) and visited Rosabella's Garden Bakery. They only had Jonagold apples available for picking. I never had those before but we were promised they'd be crisp and sweet/tart. We had a quick (surprisingly expensive) lunch in the bakery and then headed out to the fields. It took us all of about 10 minutes to pick 30-40 beautiful apples!

We also picked up some delicious apple cider, apple butter and picked out 3 pumpkins for our front stoop. We also lucked out with a pretty nice day, tho it was really windy out!!

I really wanted to go back up to this orchard and get more apples because, holy cow, they are so YUMMY!! But sadly, our upcoming Saturdays got booked up and in typical Washtonian fashion, they are closed Sundays. (Hello! Who closes a tourist attraction during peak season on a prime weekend day?!) Now I get to go and make some yummy apple recipes - starting with this cranberry apple crisp recipe that Summer shared with me!