Along with pumpkins, apples probably best symbolize the season of fall.

Hello again, I'm Doug Geed.

You're watching OutEast on Newsday TV.

We have a lot of interesting things to show you on this latest episode, including how two orchards owned by two brothers turn their apples into cider and hard cider.

We'll also take you out on beautiful Peconic Bay which has become a hotbed for oyster farming.

And a farm unlike any other on Long Island.

We'll take you to the place where they sell raw milk made from their cows.

All of that starts now.

Well let's begin with an operation that's been around more than 40 years.

Woodside Orchards.

This is their newer location, a cozy, rustic tasting room in Aquebogue just outside of Riverhead.

A few miles down the road is their main orchard.

The orchard was established in 1882 by my father.

He retired and started it.

It was a vacant land that he developed into what it is today.

- Oh, okay.

Well, what was his dream?

I mean, was it like a hobby?

- I don't know if he had a dream.

I think he was just like working hard and being dirty and seeing a good day's work in.

And he did.

In the '90s, I came on and then my brother came on after me.

Here we're primarily a U-pick operation.

We're open for the weekends in September and October.

We started making hard cider and wine at our other location in Aquebogue, and that's open year-round.

This orchard's about 12 acres, and we grow about 18 different varieties.

The U-pick works as they become ripe, because in the order of ripeness is the order we pick them.

So some people ask, "Why aren't we picking these today?"

Because they'll hang on the trees longer.

Honeycrisp is obviously the most popular.

We've planted some of those, but they're still young, so we don't have a ton of them.

So we have Gala, McIntosh, Matsu, Fuji.

Today is Thursday, Cider Making Day.

We make anywhere between 500 and 800 gallons a day.

It's all fresh, made for the upcoming weekend.

We start out with a little press.

When we first started, we used to do like 5 gallons per squish.

We probably make about 8,000 a gallon or 10,000 per cider, hard cider a year.

And the rest of it is all made fresh for the orchard or other local farm stands.

-So we see those apples going up that conveyor belt and what's happening to them along the way?

- They get ground up and they can put those on it into the pumice pump and that pumps it up to the press as you see.

And it gets squished out.

The whole apple goes in and then the mash comes out and then we just compost it.

- And is that a mix of apples in there?

- Yes.

We do it as ripe as the season goes.

We go through the trees, we take the good ones off, we get rid of the bad ones.

And with a smaller, undesirable, less color, we're going to put them into the press.

- Those are called bins?

- Yes, 20 bushels in a bin.

One bin probably makes about 55-60 gallons of cider, depending on the variety.

- The juice that comes out there, that's it?

Goes right in the container and it's good?

- The juice goes out there, there's a UV processor that processes it to kill any bacteria that possibly could be in it.

And that also increases the lifespan of the cider cell.

- And I see this year is something else to look at.

Those flowers behind you.

- Yeah, my wife, it's a passion of my wife.

And it started out small and it just keeps growing every year.

It just makes her happy.

- What kind of flowers are those?

They're dahlias, mostly, right now.

But I think next year she has plans for different varieties.

- I know you're very popular and you sell out kind of quickly.

What's the advice for people watching here in terms of... - Well, every year the crop is different.

Some years we have a ton of apples.

Some years, we don't have as many.

This year is a little below average probably, so we just run until we run out basically.

- We have U-Pick here.

We are typically weekdays, Thursday, Friday and Monday we'll be picking this year.

Here we have about 400 trees.

Up at the other place we have about 4,000.

And if we were to open this place on the weekend for you, it could just be overwhelmed.

So this way you can pick up at the other places and we can handle the crowds there.

And here we're open on the weekend for the various baked goods and the hard cider is obviously the big draw along with the wine.

- Are people more familiar with hard cider now than they were in the early days?

- Yes, I would say that's certainly the case.

And then it being gluten free and all that, it has its market share, but it's just not quite as large as say a wine or beer.

Around COVID, it really took off because we were an outside venue.

And then since then, things have, frankly, have leveled off a little bit.

Still very popular, the product is extremely well received.

Right now we have six different styles on tap.

Our traditional, our traditional sweet, or our staples, we always have those.

And the other four will rotate between a cinnamon, a raspberry, right now we have blackberry mango on tap.

Close to the Thanksgiving we'll have ginger, cranberry.

We're releasing a pumpkin for the season.

That's a very popular, yeah, this time of year for sure.

- Always.

- He'll have the following.

All our ciders are pretty, are good, they're clean, they're crisp.

Every cider we make is minimum 98% apple.

We'll grow the apples, we'll turn them to juice up at our Jamesport location, then we'll bring them down here and in the back is where everything will be turned, packed, fermented and what have you.

- What's the alcohol content?

- For the hard ciders it's right around 6.8, 6.9% so it's sneaky.

It's a very country, laid back atmosphere.

We are a family-run business and even all our staff here are people that we've known for a long time.

We're considered a tasting room so yes you can have a pint here, we do the flights here, we sample each product.

We have for takeaway consumption we have growlers.

- You're right on the main road which is good for business but also sitting back there it's like you could be in the middle of the country I feel like.

- Yeah we put the building between the road and the patios just for that very reason.

We put some paver patios in and people love it, it's a nice clean look.

We have two patios, one around the corner is overlooking the orchard, the other one is just behind the tasting room here.

Donuts are a huge draw because we don't pre-cook the donuts, they're kind of cooked to order.

So we've come to find that people rather wait in line during the peak season for 20-30 minutes to get a hot bag of donuts or something that was cooked two hours earlier.

They're called cider donuts, so basically you're adding some cider in the batter and reducing the amount of water.

We have fresh baked pies in season.

The cider slushies, that's something somebody put me onto probably about 10 years ago.

So we bought a slushie machine, a frozen drink machine, and just pour the regular cider right in there straight and freeze it up so it's like consistency of a sorbet from 7-Eleven, if you will.

And people love it.

We sell it at a low price point, something for the kids basically, and it's an all-natural product with no sugar added.

And it's very well received as well.

And we'll throw the blueberry mango in one of the hoppers and make a frozen drink for the adults as well, a hard cider.

Probably three, four years ago now, we started making our own wine.

Kelly, our winemaker, she's from California.

The poppy is a California state flower.

The rose is a New York state flower, hence Poppy & Rose.

The wine has been very well received, people enjoy it.

We have a couple different flights for tastings.

You can have a glass of it here or a bottle here or take some home.

- They're probably the two oldest professions, farming and fishing.

We just visited a farm, so for our next stop, we take you out to the water.

- I'm a Cutchogue boy, so I was born and raised there.

I asked my dad to take me fishing for like my seventh birthday and he took me flounder fishing on the Rosie Adama Riches.

He did not dress me right, froze my butt off.

For some reason I liked it.

I caught like one fish.

Everybody was freezing cold in the cabin.

I'm out there holding the rod.

I caught one fish and I was hooked.

Then I got a job at a tackle shop.

Then I worked in Cattry.

Then I went to college in Rhode Island where I studied aquaculture.

Then I ended up in Orient Point fishing there and I kind of saw the writing on the wall with fishing and had an opportunity to get a lease with Suffolk County.

So I was one of the first ones to win the lottery for a Suffolk County lease and jumped into it with both feet.

It takes us a year to a year and a half to grow an oyster to market size and we're usually handling them anywhere from 8 to 15 times before they reach your plate.

So it's a lot of love that we put into the oysters.

- Why are you handling so much?

- When you're handling the oyster, whether you're using tumbler or just giving them more room to grow, you're giving them more room to grow, you're getting them into bigger mesh, which gives them more room to better water flow.

And as we say, more flow, more grow, more dough.

So you want the water flowing through there.

Also the cages and the bags get really fouled up, so we like to change it out, give them fresh gear and also the thing about handling the oyster is kind of like pruning a tree or a bush.

It's good for the shells, gives them a nice deep cup shape and makes it easy for the shucker to open them.

That's our tumbler and that mechanically sorts them by size, four different sizes.

It also prunes the shell by knocking off that thin edge and getting them to grow a deeper cup and creates a more healthy animal.

That's what you want to see.

Meaty gills and fat belly.

Pecanic Golds is our trademark brand and that's defined by a oyster with a great shell on it, a well-defined hinge and a well-defined cup that shucks easy and is a beautiful, healthy animal and just like wine takes on the flavor of the earth, our oysters take on the flavor of the water and we're here in beautiful, sunny Cutchogue Harbor.

It's a calm, sheltered area but has incredible water flow so we're able to work out here even when it's windy, rough, cold, whatever.

Oysters love it here.

- So would you, in a blind taste test, be able to tell a Cutchogue oyster from an Orient and a Riverhead?

- Definitely from an Orient or a Riverhead but somebody else close to here, maybe not.

And the oysters, honestly, they change every day.

They probably change every week depending on the algae that's in the water that day or that week.

- How about a winter oyster versus summer?

Do they have a different texture?

- Definitely.

So right now the oysters are fattening up for winter and then throughout the winter they've got that nice glycogen store that gives them a nice sweetness.

And then one of my favorite times to eat them is actually May and June as they're getting ready for the spawn.

They take on a flavor similar to sea urchin roe, like a beautiful gaminess.

- And where are you selling that?

So I sell a lot of what I grow to Braun Seafood in Cutchogue and they do a lot of distribution.

We also ship a lot to the city and my favorite thing to do is go direct to restaurants and especially direct to the consumer at my farm stand in Cutchogue.

It's right on the north side of Sound Avenue.

We have bags of 24 in there for sale and some knives.

The best of whatever we see from each day is put into that farm stand and we're open every day, all day, year round.

- That's manned or that's self-serve?

That's a self-serve farm stand, cash or Venmo.

Typically during the growing season we're going 6:30 in the morning until 4, 4:30 and we have some marathon days as we call them where we go even later.

But there's also a lot of jockeying gear around before we get out and also a lot of maneuvering gear around after we get in and deliveries and the paperwork I mean the list goes on you know we're farming and it's not like you can just close the doors like some other businesses like the oysters keep growing and it's really a derby you try to do as much as you can during the growing season.

I think it's just a great sustainable way to farm you know it's one of the few but maybe the only way of farming where you don't add anything into the water they're just eating the algae naturally and we're actually creating a lot of life from doing it, the oysters are great for the water, they also create essential fish habitat for a bunch of keystone species in the water where we are farming now was just a barren muddy bottom and now there's so much life we see crabs and fish and all kinds of shrimp.

We see fish around the cages, oysters inside of the cage.

That's a great 3D structure that provides shelter for juvenile fish and crabs.

Our next stop is Riverhead.

Now this is Sound Avenue.

This and Route 25, they're the two major roads that run east and west on the North Fork.

If you've driven on this road you've no doubt driven past this sign.

A very simple one that says "eggs".

As for the name of the farm I never knew how to pronounce this until I visited here.

Let's try together.

Okay for this you'd probably say "tie" and for this, well who knows what you'd come up with.

This is Welsh.

It's actually pronounced "tee" like the drink and "kluwit" even though there's no "k" in there.

Let's visit the family that runs this unique operation.

- The house was built in 1873, before electricity.

We have a lot of things that other houses don't have, other people don't have.

A lot of historic things that bring us back to the old days.

As a registrar of historic places, I have a plaque over here which is kind of an honor.

My grandfather grew potatoes, so when I started farming in 1975 I think it was, we built a potato barn on the side of the house.

But then the potato business all changed and then my son grew potatoes a few years but the deals were very hard on him so he didn't want to continue doing that.

I said one day to him, why don't you sell raw milk, get a cow and sell raw milk.

I just believe you're milking a cow or two.

But it ended up he built a barn and now he's milking over 20 cows, between 20 and 25 cows depending on when they calf.

And so that has actually saved my farm, the milk.

- For people who don't know, just explain, what is raw milk?

- Raw milk is milk that has not been pasteurized.

It comes from the cow and all we do is cool it as quick as we can and then it goes into a bulk tank.

It's very important to keep raw milk cold.

That's the first rule, keep it cold.

But pasteurization destroys all the light enzymes and a lot of healthy properties in the milk and the flavor.

The raw milk tastes so much better.

It's addictive, it tastes so good.

- The people hearing that will also say, well, pasteurization also kills bacteria, right?

- Well, yeah, good and bad.

There's properties in the milk that help make it safe, too.

- Who regulates you?

- New York State Ag and Market.

We had to build things to meet their standards.

It's just a matter of meeting their requirements, which is actually a good thing, because you want to produce safe, healthy milk.

They come every month and inspect it, take a milk sample.

- Did it take a while to get people to get their raw milk?

- Oh yeah.

- Because they're not sure what it is, or they're afraid?

- When we first started, we had the one cow.

When we started, we used to dump a lot of milk.

We put it under vegetables.

It's good fertilizer for the vegetables.

Christopher gets very discouraged not selling the milk.

It was hard to get started, but eventually it took off, and now we can't meet the demand.

We had a lot of days, and we had to spend a lot of time on the phone telling people it was cold outside, we don't have milk today.

But tomorrow we have more.

More every day.

- Is the taste the same?

Do you find it fresher?

- Oh, it tastes incredibly better.

Yeah.

The store-bought milk has like a burnt kind of taste to it.

There's no way to get the flavor especially with the Jersey cows that make a creamier milk.

It has a higher fat content.

The first rule of the raw milk rule is to keep it cold.

The second rule is shake it up because the cream's on top.

To grind and milk cows every day, you're on a schedule.

The time to milk cows, everything stops.

You milk cows seven days a week.

How often do you milk cows and how much milk does a cow produce?

We milk them twice a day.

Seven o'clock in the morning and five o'clock in the evening.

And about three gallons a day I think.

Our cows don't produce as much as us.

Commercial herd because there's no grain, we don't feed grain.

All milk is grass fed, no grain raw milk.

But they don't make as much milk, but it's better milk.

- I grew up on a small farm in Wales, South Wales.

Very similar to this one actually.

- So you're Welsh, the name of your farm?

Yes, Ty Llwyd, it means brown house.

- So, "ty" means brown?

- No, "ty" means house.

"Llwyd" means brown.

- Okay.

And what does that "k" sound?

That always confuses me.

- I know, it's a "llwyd".

The "l" is a double "l", "llwyd".

- Interesting.

Okay.

Do people come in here all the time and say, "How the heck do you pronounce this?"

- Sometimes they take us by our name.

Sometimes they say, "David is Ty."

People come to the farm to buy produce, and it's very convenient because it means I don't have to be out front by the road all the time.

In between customers, I can be getting on with my other work.

And most of my customers, they call ahead to order because we only have a limited supply.

We sell whatever's in season.

We only sell what we grow.

It's 30 acres.

Most of it is grassland for the cows.

But my husband has about half an acre of vegetables.

It's only a small farm.

We have about 800 laying chickens right now, I think.

People like to get the fresh brown organic eggs.

- Do you find a different taste than supermarket?

- I don't know.

I suppose I must have eaten a supermarket egg somewhere.

Obviously ours was better.

- Do you have people coming from all over?

- Oh, all over.

I have one lady who's been coming, who's from Queens, and has been coming for years just to get two bottles of milk.

Every Wednesday she comes.

- And you're open year-round?

- We're open year-round.

We try to close at Thanksgiving and Christmas, but pretty much we're open year-round.

- So if someone popped in here January or February?

Oh, yeah.

We'd have to be here.

- And the farm stand is open?

- Yeah.

We store stuff in the barn.

The sweet potatoes and the potatoes and fish just bring them out.

Brussel sprouts, they can take the cold.

We're open all year-round because the cows keep milking and the chickens keep laying eggs.

They don't take a day off.

And neither do we.

Our next story is a little more serious.

It has to do with Peconic Bay scallops.

They're very small but very sought after delicacy from these waters.

Back in the 1980s, brown tide almost wiped out the local scallop population.

They gradually came back.

By 2015 and 16, they were back in big numbers.

Then came 2019, another big die-off blamed on a parasite.

Now Cornell Marine researchers are once again trying to bring back their population.

- We first went out to Orient right off the causeway.

There we have thousands of lanternets, which is a commercial type of aquaculture gear.

They house scallops ranging from a couple months to about 18 months.

Right now we currently have about 700,000 to 800,000 scallops out there.

It's called a spawner sanctuary.

They're protected from predators, so you have no predation, but you also have them in very close proximity to each other.

So you're helping ensure successful fertilization of the eggs by the sperm, which really helps promote that recruitment that we want to see.

And what we actually went out and looked at today were two different lineages we produced in 2024.

The first line we looked at were scallops we produced from Mariches broodstock that we collected in 2023 and then the second line would have been produced from Peconic broodstock that we collected throughout the Peconic in 2023 and the idea behind having multiple lineages we started seeing survival trends and differences between different lineages specifically Martha's Vineyard and Peconic lineages.

So the Martha's Vineyard lineages we were seeing anywhere from 70 to 95 percent survival by harvest, whereas the Peconic range from 5 to 25 percent survival.

So the idea was if we're seeing increased survival in Martha's Vineyard scallops, maybe we'll see increased survival in Mariches scallops.

So this year we spawned Martha's Vineyard, Mariches, and Peconic scallops, and we have about 700,000 of them out there right now where they'll spawn and hopefully distribute those genetics throughout the Peconic.

This parasite was first documented in 2019 and we can say it's largely responsible for the die-offs we're seeing in the peconic.

- Just for you personally doing this, you know, just a personal passion to like kind of solve this puzzle that will mean so much, you know, for consumers who have a big demand and for the economy and the... - I mean, so like, don't get me wrong, I love the science, but like this isn't a science experiment.

Like this is applied science to a problem, which is the economy, which is these Baymen, which is their families, bringing back all of the lost revenue.

I mean, this is right around Christmas, Hanukkah.

So like these families potentially don't have anything to buy gifts with and that's what we want to bring back.

- And for our final stop, we're going to visit a farm in Cutchogue that's been in operation literally hundreds of years.

This is said to be the very first farm stand on the North Fork.

It was the 1950s when the Wickham Family started selling their produce directly to customers who came to their farm.

- We farm on the order of 150 acres.

- More than half of that acreage is used to grow fruit, berries and cherries, peaches and pears, apples and apricots.

- I grew up here in the 1950s and '60s.

- Tom Wickham's ancestors settled on the North Fork in the late 1600s.

He estimates that he's the 13th generation to own and operate this farm.

- We like to welcome our people and we get to know them.

I'm usually out in the field myself.

People have been here two, sometimes three generations.

And they proudly come up to me and say, "You know, I've been here since the 1960s" or something like that.

- One of the big draws here is the u-pick option.

The Dooley family drives all the way from western Nassau to eastern Suffolk to pick apples here every year.

- They love the berries and we love the apples.

We usually try to come this time of year when the apples are just starting to get ripe.

- It's just about picking the fruit and being able to eat it right away.

It's so fresh and it just makes them appreciate it more.

healthy treat, right?

- Maybe not quite so healthy, but definitely a treat is what they bake here with what they grow.

- Every single day you can have our apple cider doughnuts.

We do a wide assortment of pies, so we'll bake the pies fresh every day.

We also have our apple turnovers, which we started a couple years ago.

All handmade with our fresh apples right now.

- And it's not a bad marketing strategy that the kitchen is right in the farm stand where customers are shopping.

- I had two vents installed for the ovens and the doughnut machines, so at 7 in the morning the entire town smells like baked goods.

- And no matter what food customers leave here with, the farmer also hopes they leave with a taste of history and appreciation of all the people that have worked this land literally for centuries to feed others.

- We bought the property, I say we, my ancestors and the colonial settlers bought that land from two heads of oxen.

And it's in the South Old Town Records.

Part of that field was 15 acres that was farmed by American Indians.

And it was farmed for over 300 years.

Ever since then, it's been another 300 plus years.

So that makes a good 700 years of continuous production in farming.

I hope you enjoyed this episode.

On our next show, we're going to visit this beautiful place, the Jedediah Hawkins Inn in Jamesport.

Built in the mid 1800s, it was the home of a whaling industry magnate.

It fell into disrepair, was almost torn down, but today it's a popular inn, restaurant and speakeasy.

You can check out more of my segments at Newsday.com.

I'm Doug Geed.

Thanks for watching.

We'll see you next time, OutEast, on Newsday TV.

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