This story by Briana Brady was first published in the Shelburne News on Oct. 9, 2025.
Even on a Thursday morning, if the sun is shining, Shelburne Orchards is busy. Kids run in and out of the trees. A group of teens hangs out at a table near the cider doughnut operation. Parents look over the wares at the store.
“Once the orchard is open for the season, it’s a public place,” owner Nick Cowles said.
Despite the drought, Shelburne Orchards is doing well. That’s partly because the orchard, which has 8,000 apple trees and seven varieties of peaches, is largely a pick-your-own operation. While the lack of rain might mean apples are dropping from the trees earlier than expected, it’s also given the orchard beautiful sunny weekend days when people are happy to spend their time wandering through the trees.
Cowles, a tall, friendly man in a white cowboy hat, took over the orchard from his father 50 years ago. For a while, he ran it just like his dad had. About 80% of the operation was picking and packing apples to sell to supermarkets and wholesalers. However, around 2000, something changed.
Around that time, Cowles took a trip out to Colorado. While he was there, he visited some orchards, connecting with one owner in particular who gave him a piece of advice that helped make Shelburne Orchards what it is today.
“He wanted to look on a map to see where my orchard was. And he’s like, ‘Oh my God, you’re right on the lake.’ And, ‘Oh, my god, Burlington. How big is Burlington?’ He said, you have the perfect place to have people come to you,” Cowles said.
So, Cowles switched things around. He started hosting a festival featuring local farmers — he’d ask everyone to bring a dish to sell made from the food they grew, and he hired musicians to come and play.
Even though now the festival has faded away, it helped launch Shelburne Orchards as a pick-your-own experience. Cowles still has musicians there every weekend day, including special programming for children on Sundays, offers tractor-pulled wagon rides into the orchard, and often brings in food trucks.
Now, retail sales, which include the store and pick-your-own, makes up 95% of the business, according to Cowles. The only store he sells to is the local market in Shelburne. The season is less about picking and packing, and more about bringing people in to enjoy the orchard and leave delighted by their bag of hand-picked apples and full of cider doughnuts.
For a lot of people, it’s an annual tradition.
“There’s an unusual amount of people who come here to buy doughnuts to send to their kids that just went to college,” he said.
Switching to a pick-your-own model also cleared out some space at the orchard — they no longer needed a packing room — so Cowles decided to start making brandy. Now, in a room behind a wrought iron gate worthy of a fairy tale with an apple at its center, Cowles keeps his distillery barrels. The oldest one, he said, is from 2009. He plans to open it when his grandson turns 21.
The brandy operation is one more way the orchard may be set up to ride through a drought. Unlike other products, apple brandy can be made with dropped apples — apples that fall from the tree before they’re picked, which happens more when there’s less rain.
“The trees are stressed now, and we’re more than halfway through harvest. At this point, apples are dropping early, so there’s a lot of apples on the ground, which is painful, because they can’t be used for cider,” Cowles said.
The distilling process, however, kills any bacteria.
In addition to concerns about droughts or floods, as the weather has trended warmer because of climate change, Cowles has also been planting peaches along with the apples. While when he began doing it 20 or so years ago, frost would kill about two out of every three crops, now, he gets a good harvest of cold-hardy peaches most years.
Now that he’s in his 70s, he said he’s moving toward a kind of retirement — he’s never going to actually retire, but he’s giving himself permission to focus on the parts he loves the most, like making the brandy. His daughter and her husband have come into the business, and he’s ready to let them carry the operation.
“This is such a beautiful place to be, and so much part of this business is the payoff of getting to be here and work,” he said.
He’s still going to make the brandy, still going to prune trees and put his hands to work doing carpentry projects. He’ll also likely still be setting up surprises in the orchard. In true Wonderland fashion, Cowles has created little scenes in parts of the orchard like his “apple room”, where people can enter through a door between two trees, and then follow the arrows until they reach a little table beneath an umbrella next to a standing fireplace.
Leaving the apple room on Sunday, three small children zoomed past Cowles into the orchard. Then, one stopped. He pointed up at Cowles and exclaimed, “I recognize you!” before he kept running.
More than fifty years in, if apples will still grow in Vermont, Shelburne Orchards will keep on picking.
