Autumn Hills Orchard
An idyllic orchard, largely untouched by modernity, where you can choose to pick your own peaches, apples, pears, blueberries, and raspberries.
What do you do after a successful corporate life when your children have reached young adulthood and you have recently retired?
Play golf? Spend lots of quality time with your adult children? Get an RV and visit the national parks? Re-read the classics?
How about becoming fruit farmers, spending your days driving tractors, picking berries, pruning trees, packing CSA boxes, running a farmstand, and along with a small crew, doing all that’s needed to maintain an orchard and help it thrive?
That’s exactly what Kim and Ed Herdiech chose to do when they bought Autumn Hills Orchard in June 2021. They had retired the previous June after 25 years of desk jobs, with Ed serving as a CFO for a software company and Kim serving as the head of HR at the Groton School.
They had visited the same farm on many occasions just for fruit and fun before the opportunity arose to buy it and have a photo of their 4-year-old twin boys in front of the orchard’s tractor to prove it.
When the previous orchard owner Ann Harris was interviewing prospective buyers last spring, the Herdiech’s showed her the photo [above left]. This sentimental touch and assurance that the Herdiechs were committed to running an orchard versus using the land for other purposes sealed the deal. They also got the tractor to go with the land and 4,000 fruit-bearing trees. Now there are 4,500 trees, including apple, pear, and peach trees, along with plum, pluot, and apricot trees. Autumn Hills Orchard also grows blueberries and raspberries that customers love.
Every September for the past 10-plus years, we’ve been going to Autumn Hills to pick apples. The apples are crisp and sweet, but we also go to climb the hills, hear the birds, see the way the sun hits the trees, and enjoy the backdrop of the mountains in the distance. We discovered their astonishingly delicious peaches last year and returned this year to pick peaches and scoop the last of the apricots, which are not commonly grown in Massachusetts and best enjoyed when fresh picked. I’m not alone in my apricot obsession; they’ve had customers drive from Springfield, MA—about a 90-mile drive—just for the apricots.
Apple picking can be carnival-like in some venues, with corn mazes, petting zoos, cider donuts, horse-drawn trolleys—or worse—tractor-drawn trolleys, gift shops, and other attractions (or distractions depending upon your taste). At Autumn Hills, it’s all about the fruit and the pastoral scenery. It’s quiet and definitively uncrowded. Yes, they do sell cider donuts because that is expected by any self-respecting orchard visitor in autumn. On a clear day you can watch people sky diving above Pepperell Airport, which is just under 4 miles away as the crow flies, or gaze at Mount Monadnock’s peak roughly 40 miles to the northwest. Not surprising, plans are in the works for a group of plein air painters to have a painting day at the orchard.
Tending the fruits of her and the orchard teams’ labors in the shade of a blue vendor’s tent, an objectively exuberant Kim chats with customers and describes a blueberry salad dressing that sounds really good [the recipe is at the end of this article]. With genuine curiosity, she asks her customers what they will do with the fruit. She asks, “What will you do with the peaches—bake with them?” One visitor answers that she will make a caprese salad including peaches, mozzarella, basil, tomatoes, and prosciutto, which led me and Kim to swoon.
What’s great is that Kim encourages people to sample the fruit. She has every reason to be confident they will love it. She gets sincere joy from seeing people enjoy a ripe peach or an apple that tastes dramatically better than the supermarket fare.
After learning about their corporate backgrounds, I wondered how Kim and Ed were adjusting to spending their days in such a dramatically different way. The answer is simple: It’s hard work and they love it.
What led to you buy the farm, so to speak?
KIM: Ed always wanted an apple orchard in Vermont. Last April we learned the orchard was for sale and thought we can’t let houses be built here. We came here and everything was in bloom on this beautiful spring day. It was so peaceful.
There’s something about this orchard that’s different than busier farms. People who come here don’t want a circus. They want to walk to the top of the hill and see the view as a starting point, and they are rewarded by the uninterrupted rolling hills. When you are here, it’s special. We came here to keep the land open instead of another tract of housing, and make the orchard sustain itself.
ED: Owning an orchard was a dream of mine. I grew up in in Western Mass, in Greenfield, and frequently visited the hilltown orchards with my parents. We visited in every season and I developed a love for the landscape and its authenticity. I envisioned having a barn, a tractor, and a few trees [laughs because he has more than a few trees]. I was ready to get back to work after retiring from the software business, but I did not know then that the work would be two times what I expected—but that is ok.
Now, our goals are simple: Protect this special property, maintain a vital local high-quality food source, engage with community, and employ local people.
What’s involved in running the farm on a day-to-day basis?
ED: With guidance from Peter, our farm manager, I run the crew, which is sometimes myself and another gentleman and a college student, and at busier times up to eight people. We plant new trees, prune the trees, grapes and blueberries, thin raspberries and mulch our blueberries—maintenance work required in the spring. Then we transition to maintaining raspberries and blueberries, training the branches of new apple trees, mowing the grass, planting pumpkins and gourds, fixing our irrigation, thinning the peaches, and pulling weeds. Now we are picking fruit and packing it. It starts with plums followed by peaches and then apples.
We have 500 new trees and there’s a lot to do to make sure they grow and become mature trees. Peter and I also work on planning what trees we want to plant and where we will plant them. That’s important because the nurseries propagating the varieties of trees we want to grow need to start them two years before we get them.
This is my first go-around with planting. We planted a new a Honeycrisp block in the back of the orchard this spring because so many people like Honeycrisp. We also planted 80 blackberry bushes because people frequently asked for them and it looked like a fun project. They are doing great and will be ready to pick in 2023. Next year we are going to plant 300 new peach, pear, and apple trees—to fill commercial needs and heirloom interests. I also work with all the CSA partners and a select group of interesting distribution partners that sell our fruit—managing pricing, orders, scheduling, and delivering.
KIM: Everything comes back to the fruit: Whether we are preparing it, picking it, sorting it, packing it, or selling it. On any day, we are doing any combination of that. Once the maintenance that Ed described is done, we have the delivery of the CSA shares, and delivery of the fruit to sellers. Today I was in the barn packing 200 CSA boxes. Plus, there’s all the technical stuff, like payroll.
What did you need to learn?
ED: We had to learn all aspects of the business. Fortunately, Peter is a thoughtful and patient teacher. One hard thing for me is that I like to start something and finish it. On the farm, you never finish anything. It’s too big and you can never completely weed the raspberries or prune all the trees, or completely do anything because you run out of time and must move onto the next thing that’s a higher priority.
Other orchard owners have been very supportive. The Carlson’s reached out after we bought the orchard and said if we needed anything to let them know. It’s not a cutthroat business at all. The orchard owners get together several times a year, whether it’s part of the Massachusetts Fruit Growers Association summer meeting or other meetings that bring orchard owners together, and everyone is supportive of one another. The industry understands that the more people each individual orchard impacts, the more it benefits the whole industry, which is a lot different than selling software.
You mentioned you use a bee service. Tell me about it.
ED: A local company that provides pollination services nationally brings bees to pollinate the orchard. This year, we had 18 hives brought in and spread around the orchard. There were half a million bees at the orchard pollinating the trees. The bees arrive right before bloom time, and you hope you have good weather so the bees want to come out of their hives and pollinate. The effectiveness of this process helps to determine fruit set—or the amount of apples we will have each year.
How many varieties of apples do you have?
ED: We have 35 varieties of apples, including numerous heirloom varieties, for pick your own and we grow about 55 varieties in total, many of which are young trees that are not in production yet. Most the latter were specifically planted with cider making in mind.
What makes up the business—is it mostly from people who come here to pick peaches and apples?
ED: Most of the business—60-70%—is pick your own. Pick your own peaches is new this year and has been received extremely well. We also partner with five local high-quality farms that include our fruit as an optional add-on to their vegetable CSA programs.
We also sell fruit as a premium supplier to specialty fruit/food suppliers. The apples that have too many blemishes but are still perfectly good fruit are sold to the cider mill.
Last year we picked 200,000 pounds of fruit in total. [If the crop was all apples, that would be about 300,000-400,000 apples, which makes Autumn Hills a small to medium-sized orchard compared to others in New England].
Is the fruit organic?
ED: It’s really difficult to be organic at this scale. We are not, but we apply the most current integrated pest management (IPM) best practices. IPM is about addressing issues you are seeing in the orchard at the time, rather than the old days when it was common to spray everything.
We collaborate with an IPM consultant and with other orchards to learn what they are seeing and doing to inform our spray plan. We are extremely careful about how and when we spray and strictly follow re-entry and harvest instructions. Our goal is to produce high-quality fruit in the most sustainable way possible.
What’s been the best part of owning the farm?
KIM: My husband is the happiest I’ve ever seen him when he’s working on the farm.
ED: Being in the orchard in the early spring and seeing these beautiful trees pruned, with nothing on them, set against the backdrop of this beautiful property, and then seeing the leaves grow, then the flowers. Then to see the flowers transform into fruit over stages—it’s both magical and humbling.
There is a lot of gratification with maintaining the orchard. It’s fun to have a staff of people I didn’t know before, meet all these new people, and engage with the community. I used to get in my car and drive to Boston every day, come home at night and go to bed, and do it again. I didn’t have quite the same connection to the people and the land before.
I like talking to customers who enjoy the orchard for different reasons. Two weeks ago an older gentleman and his wife walked into the barn. He told me he was stopping in to see the orchard because he worked here for five years in the early 1970's. He was visiting from his home in Montana and was back East to settle some family estate business in New Hampshire. I sensed the orchard visit might have been a bit of a pilgrimage and offered them a UTV ride around the property. His face lit up and off we went touring the orchard, talking about what looked different, the trees, and his orchard job. At the end, I asked him if the ride brought back any good memories and he said, "it sure did." This was genuinely a touching moment for me too.
KIM: Our crew is hard working people who like to be on the orchard, find it interesting, and like working hard. They are a combination of college students and some people who are older and have the time and the interest.
What’s the most surprising or unexpected aspect about being fruit farmers?
KIM: I’m surprised how far people drive to come here. People come from Boston and farther away.
ED: We get calls from people, “are the Northern Spy ready yet? I’m coming from Rhode Island.” The amount of interest in the different types of apples, ones that aren’t as well-known, is really fun.
Also, we get a lot of great feedback and motivation from our CSA customers at our partner farms—Drumlin Farm, Waltham Fields Community Farm, Newton Community Farm, Upswing Farm, and Stearns Farm. After all, everything we do is in effort to produce the best fruit possible.
What is your seasonal cadence like?
ED: It’s year-round, but the fruit season starts end of June with raspberries, then blueberries, then we get early stone fruit, then apples. Apples go until November, so it’s four months of harvest time.
Right after we’re done with pick your own in November, we get all the apples off the trees that we can. The ones with too many imperfections go to the cider mill. The ones in good condition we give to charity or have one of the charities come here to pick them. Last year we donated 20,000 pounds of fruit to Boston Area Gleaners [an organization that bridges food distribution gaps including partnering with farms to harvest and pack donated food and distribute it to food banks and food pantries].
In the fall, we also get the orchard ready for bed. We take the pumps out of the ponds from which we pump water and we take out the irrigation drip lines, mulch the blueberries, and clean up everything. We prune the trees in the winter.
When we get to spring, it’s time to start the whole process involving the trees. The apple trees look the way they do because when they are young, we train them, which often means literally tying down the branches so they have the right angle and separation from each other. We want to make sure that the air and sun are getting into the tree canopy, which helps nourish the trees and reduce conditions for the spread of diseases. We do a lot of work on the trees early on. Then the next thing you know, the trees are bearing fruit and the customers start showing up! We have some time off in the winter and spring and do some traveling.
How is the drought affecting the orchard?
ED: The drought has affected the blueberries and raspberries. We planted 300 trees this year and 100 last year and we’ve had to hand water them with water we pump from a pond at the back of the property into a water tanker that we pull around the orchard with a tractor.
Do you want to grow or change any aspect of the orchard?
ED: We are not looking to change the orchard. People love coming to visit the orchard because of its natural state and it’s a beautiful property. Often it is a family ritual and many people talk to me about the deep connection and memories that they have with the orchard. We love that too. We want to enhance it a little bit and find more ways for the community to enjoy it and have more access to it.
KIM: We want to do more at the farm with sharing varieties of apples and why they are different, how they taste. I’ve been working with Groton Neighbors, a local organization that pairs younger volunteers with older people in the community. We are going to have a session here and we will talk about the orchard, the fruit, and the trees, and we will cut up the apples and have a tasting. The Garden Club came and did a farm tour last year. We’ve had apple tastings similar to wine tastings and I would like to do more of that.
What are your favorite fruits you grow?
KIM: Blueberries and nectarines, but I love the apples too.
ED: Peaches and Macoun apples. Spending more time with the apples, my favorite might be something different this year. But the Macouns were really good last year.
PETER: All the apples.
Lightning-round questions: People often bond over food and art, and here are quick questions about both.
Favorite breakfast?
ED: Coffee and a banana
KIM: Avocado toast
Red or black licorice?
ED: Red
KIM: Black
Let’s say tomorrow is your birthday and I’m baking you a cake. What kind should I bake?
ED: Chocolate cake
KIM: Strawberry shortcake with fresh blueberries and strawberries
What’s the most memorable meal you ever had?
KIM: It was at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. I was there for four hours. We had a tour of the garden. I tasted a carrot that was beyond a magical moment. I can’t even explain. There was nothing on the carrot. It was remarkable.
ED: They are working with local farmers to breed vegetable for flavor rather than shelf life. As for a memorable meal, I love a nice wood-fired thin-crust pizza with fresh marinara sauce, mozzarella, tomatoes, and garlic. The more irregular the pizza shape and crispy burnt the better.
You are hosting a dinner party with 6 people living or dead, plus your spouse. Who are you inviting and what are you serving?
ED: It would be family and Carl Yastrzemski so my father and brother could chat with him about baseball all night. There would be plenty of pizza served.
KIM: My boys, other family members, and Oprah. I would serve homemade pasta with broccoli.
Favorite piece of art you own.
ED: Steve Lyons, who was an artist in Chatham who recently passed away. He brought back an older painting style, impasto. His painting of a flower garden is my favorite.
KIM: Mine would be a seascape by Steve Lyons.
Most captivating museum visit.
ED: Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. I found the Dutch history and how it was presented with the old masters’ paintings so interesting.
KIM: The Accademia Gallery in Florence. Our group had a private tour before the museum was open. Our boys were 14 or 15, and it was a two-hour discussion about the David that was unbelievable. We were all spellbound.
Quick and easy blueberry dressing
Kim serves this dressing on a salad of lettuce, tomatoes, red peppers, carrots, blueberries, avocado, and goat cheese, and sometimes adds chicken to complete the meal.
2 cups fresh blueberries
1/4 cup balsamic or white vinegar
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1/2 cup avocado oil or olive oil
Dash of pepper
Honey or maple syrup to taste
Put all ingredients in a food processor and whip until smooth.
Palate & Palette menu for Ed and Kim
Here’s what Palate & Palette would serve if Ed and Kim came to dinner, which they are welcome to do.
Peach caprese (peaches, tomatoes, fresh-made mozzarella, and basil drizzled with a very good balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil) with a Bread Obsession baguette
Roasted chicken with peaches, basil, and ginger
Barley, plum, pistachio, and beet salad
Apple crisp
Where to find Autumn Hills (and you should!)
Autumn Hills Orchard
495 Chicopee Row, Groton, MA
Facebook and Instagram: @autumnhillsorchard
Wonderful story and pictures. Makes me want to be a fruit farmer when I grow up.