Rulfs Orchard

Rulfs has anchored the farm country south of Plattsburgh since 1952 — a family orchard on Bear Swamp Road in Peru that grew into the Champlain shelf's year-round farm stand. The store and bakery run all four seasons: cider donuts made daily, pies, the farm's own honey and maple syrup, and produce that follows the calendar out of their own fields. Fall is the show. U-pick McIntosh opens in early September — the orchard grows mostly Macs, with more varieties as the season deepens — and picking runs through the first week of October, peak-foliage weeks exactly. From mid-September the corn maze runs on weekends, including after-dark flashlight nights, alongside the pick-your-own pumpkin patch and a petting zoo with alpacas, goats, horses, and donkeys. Spring brings strawberries; June brings the annual Strawberry Festival. For fall visitors the geometry is the point: Rulfs sits minutes off the Northway between Ausable Chasm and Plattsburgh, which makes an orchard stop the natural first or last hour of any eastern-corridor foliage day.