Whether we pick’em ourselves or buy’em in bags, come fall, we want fresh apples. A couple years ago, we discovered Hurricane Hollow Apple Orchard in Baxter, TN. It wasn’t the closest orchard to Nashville, but – after getting off the phone with Leon Boyd, the proprietor and chief picker for the past thirty-five years – we knew it was the one.
Just a few miles off of I-40, Leon and his wife, Edwina, own a small orchard with an unusual abundance of apple varieties, about eight in all. The apples are sorted and bagged and ready to buy, in pecks and in bushels. Or as cider if you enjoy your apples juiced. The apple farming duo are old school to their core, Edwina recording the purchases in a spiral notebook in the little shed that serves for a store and Leon, with one helper, picking all the apples the old-fashioned way: an apple bag strapped to his chest. Time was when Leon let the public pick their own fruit, but Leon stopped that when a customer got more than he bargained for. “One guy got a rattler up his pant leg,” Leon recalls. “He thought it was a vine and swatted it and found it was a rattler. “
