Washington County apple farmers facing challenges after late spring freeze

MCMURRAY, Pa. — Fall festival season will look slightly different across many farms in Western Pennsylvania when it comes to apple picking.

“It may not look like it does other years, where trees are loaded with apples; every tree has tons. They will find some trees that do, and some that don’t have any or very few,” Scott Simmons said.

At Simmons Farm in McMurray, the Simmons family has been farming for generations, and they’ve never seen an apple crop like this.

“Not to this extent, in my knowledge. This is a pretty severe freeze for apples,” Simmons said.

That late-spring freeze hit farmers hard, killing some crops and keeping others from fully developing.

“It was only two, three nights; that’s all it took. It only took a couple hours,” Simmons said.

They are encouraging people to come out while supplies last.

Simmons says they plan to limit pick-your-own-apples to weekdays, to give folks who love the tradition a chance to make it happen and he’s hopeful they can keep it going through most of the season.

“We don’t want to scare them away; we want to sell the apples we have, and maybe I’m wrong, maybe we have enough to go the distance! But we still have lots of other activities that, if we don’t have quite enough apples, we have flower picking is big for us now, and hay rides and all that stuff,” Simmons said.

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