In 2005, Sara Goering and Paul Rasch bought 67 acres of land from Jean and Mike Divoky. The land was a combination of row crop and pasture land which was part of the Divoky’s dairy operation. They soon began ground preparation for their orchard, including deep chisel plowing to break up plow pans, cover cropping and planting grass/clover mixes in all non orchard land for future pasture.
Also in 2015, we built a 6000 sq. ft production facility for making sweet cider and providing cold storage and an area for sorting fresh apples.
In 2016, Wilson’s Orchard began making hard cider to complement sweet cider at the new facility. The next year, we planted an additional 3,500 trees in a separate block with varieties exclusively chosen for hard cider production. These varieties included US natives like Gold Rush, as well as English cider varieties like Dabinette, Yarlington Mill, and others.
In 2007, an 8' deer fence was built around the orchard site, and the pair planted 8000 dwarf apple trees of 21 different varieties. An additional 12 varieties were grafted up and established as a nursery. Two years later, those 3000 grafted trees were planted and we picked our first small crop of apples from the already established trees. Two years after that, we had our first full crop of most varieties.
In 2015, we received our first batch of Katadhin sheep, who were watched over by our first Great Pyranees guardian dog, Gandolf.
