Phantom Farms - Cumberland, RI - Life South of BostonLife South of Boston

Apple picking

http://www.phantomfarms.com/

It was a beautiful Saturday morning and we decided it was time to head out for our yearly apple picking adventure. Typically, we go up North to one of the huge commercialized farms, but being that we have a bit of a time restraint these days with my son’s nap at noon, we decided to check out one of the closer orchards. We headed on out to Wrentham to the Big Apple orchard and unloaded the car. While they had an awesome store and hayrides going on, we were a bit disappointed to find that there was no apple picking this weekend. We will definitely have to try them another time though! We tried not to let that dampen our spirits and were given a tip by another family to check out Phantom Farms in Cumberland, RI. To our surprise, we were only 10 mins from RI so decided to give it a go. I called ahead this time to make sure there was apple picking and we were on our way.

Phantom Farms is a really cute place. We started out with the reason we were there, apple picking. Grabbed two bags and walked on out to the orchard. The orchard is quite different from a lot of the other places we’ve been with rows and rows of trees crammed in as many as possible. Instead, this was a wide open field of grass with sporadic apple trees planted. The kids had fun running through the orchard lawn from tree to tree, trying to find which has the biggest reddest apples. They were only picking MacIntosh apples when we were there but from the looks of their website, they might have different varieties later on in the season. The kids spent some time on my husband and father in law’s heads and shoulders, trying to get to the apples way up top and we filled our bags up high! (To be honest – we found the bags to be a bit pricey – $20 for the smaller bag but sucked it up to the experience and made sure to top em off!)

From there, we exited the orchard to check out the animals. My son and his 2 year old cousin had already chased down a chicken on the orchard (it was just walking around) and were excited by the goats and chickens by the store as well. The little ones “talked” to the animals as my daughter and her 5 year old cousin went to check out the burlap maze. They managed to find their way in and out of it three times and had a blast running through it.

They also had hayrides and face painting going on for a small fee. Everyone started getting hungry and tired so we grabbed some delicious sandwiches for the road (and candy apples too) and headed home. They had a really impressive bakery inside the country store as well with everything from pies to eclairs to canollies. There is also a small cafe area where people were enjoying coffee and muffins/dessert as well as a garden center with pumpkins and mums.

Overall, a cute place for a morning of fun! Certainly not as fancy and commercialized as some of the large apple orchards you find up north but they had trees with apples on them which is really all you need.

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