“There’s no regrets,” says Shelley Lyall as she reflects on 50 years running Mountain Orchards. “We wish things had gone better over here or done this maybe a little different, but not any deep regrets.”
Lyall, her husband Phil and their business partner Bob Hobson invested in the farm together in 1973, opening in 1974, all with no experience in the apple business.
“Kids our age (were) buying up old farms, moving out to the country and tried to do a subsistence living,” Lyall said.
She remembers how people she knew would drive beat-up old cars and make their own clothes.
The start-up really was a group effort Lyall says. With an investment from their parents, advice from a horticulturalist and help from the previous owners, it was a lot of learning on-the-go.
While the business sees hundreds of people on a good day today, there were a lot of trial runs at the beginning. Lyall says a lot of it all came down to adapting to what did and didn’t work.
The orchard, located about 10 kilometres east of Kemptville, sells many products, such as apples, cider and baked goods, but it is easy for a family to enjoy a day at the farm at no charge.
“We don’t charge admission, we don’t charge parking, we don’t charge for the wagon rides, we don’t charge for any of that stuff,” Lyall says. “We never have, and we never will.”
Happy customers
Amanda Caillot, who is from France, was visiting the orchard for the second time – the first was in 2023 – and plans on making it a yearly tradition. “We’ve never done this before, so it was … nice. Just the whole thing … picking apples.”
Her partner, Caleb Kurmejevs is also captivated by the orchard. “It’s nice to get out of the city and be a bit more (in) nature.”
Being from France and Latvia, the couple has enjoyed the experience as apple picking isn’t a common thing where they’re from.
Highs and lows
They’ve also had to adapt to technological changes. Today, the wagon fits many people, but in the beginning, “we had a crummy old wagon and a really old 1949 tractor, which we still have, and threw some hay bales up on the wagon and took people for rides back into the orchard and dumped them off, and they picked their own,” Lyall says.
Along with upgrading machinery, the orchard also had to make a big switch to computers in the 1980s, after one particularly bad year that almost saw the business shut down. The owners were told if they didn’t switch to a computerized system to keep things more organized, the bank would repossess the farm.
And it wasn’t just some bad financial years that the business had to face. Other crises, like the economic crisis of 2008 and COVID-19 took a toll. Every day the owners would breathe a sigh of relief when it was another day open.
Even when the pandemic shut businesses down across the country, Mountain Orchards adapted and survived. Lyall credits daily meetings that discussed what new measures needed to be implemented. Still, from signs needing to be hung, to new provincial protocols coming, it was difficult.
“Every day was different. And people were, I have to say, very accommodating,” Lyall said, crediting customers for still coming out and following the rules.
Generations return
Paul Morgan has worked at the orchard for four seasons. While he finds some days hectic, the customers are his favourite part. “I enjoy meeting the people and families, watching the kids play and have a good time, [with] smiles on their faces.”
It’s not just the kids playing that brings a smile to people’s faces. “We’ve had so many kids working for us. And these kids are now parents bringing their kids back,” Lyall said.
She tells a story of one girl who turned 21 a couple of years ago. Like any other year, she insisted on celebrating her birthday at the orchard. When asked why she still wanted her birthday there, “Just because she was older, she said, I’m not changing that. I’ve done this my whole life. My birthday is always here,” Lyall said.
The future
As for the future, Lyall thinks 2024 will be her last season full-time at the orchard. “I’m thinking of retiring and not being here as much, which … is really hard, because I’ve been here for 50 years.”
While the other owners aren’t thinking of retiring anytime soon, Lyall hopes that whoever eventually takes over won’t change things too much. She hopes, “whenever we relinquish the reins, it carries on in the same flavour that we managed to build up. … I wouldn’t want to see it turned into a Disney World.”
As for the greatest thing Lyall has taken away from Mountain Orchard, it’s the importance of communication. “Business partnerships as a rule, statistically speaking, they never work,” she said.
She thinks the partnership between the three of them has managed to last 50 years comes down to the ways they’ve been able to communicate with one another. “If you can’t communicate with whomever, then you’re kind of dead in the water.”
This is how they’ve managed to keep the simplicity of the orchard. The simple wagon rides, treats and apple picking are able to still be a viable option by making changes when they need to be done but keeping the essence of that simplicity. “Bob says, ‘Just improve on what you’ve got. [You] don’t have to change it completely,’” Lyall says.
When looking back on the very beginning, Lyall thinks about the giant risk they took. “It was just a shot in the dark, we didn’t know what we were doing, and so we just kind of jumped in with both feet and then, right off the bat, we had a beautiful crop of apples.”
Fifty years later, that shot in the dark seems to have hit the mark.
