Three cheers for Volante Farms in Needham, and their website. In season, this web page reliably tells what apple varieties they have to sell.
Yesterday, Genevieve Weston, of Weston's Antique Apples, shared a list of a dozen apple varieties that are ready to eat, in a Facebook post.
Macks' Apples in New Hampshire reeled me in a few years ago with this tweet:
Like apple concentrate: intensely flavored chestnut crabapples in our Farm Market right now. http://t.co/Rl2tHcb1— Mack's Apples (@macksapples) October 8, 2011
I'm no fool: I got myself right up there.
Clarkdale Fruit Farms has a weekly e-newsletter with current fruit information.
Here's the pitch. If you want to sell apples, tell people specifically what you've got today.
Then people will visit you and buy those apples.
Is this so hard? Most growers don't bother.
Tip: A list of all the apple varieties that you sometimes have at your farm stand (but maybe not this week, or this year) is not good enough.
How it's done
Weston's gets extra credit, because not only do they post to Facebook, they also put the news out on Twitter. So they have an amazing selection of heritage apples and they cast a big net.
I'd never been to Mack's before I read that tweet. Now that I know how great a place it is, they get repeat business from me.
Look, I get it. Farming is not a social media business, and who has time to fiddle with facebook during the harvest?
But so many orchards go to such trouble in season to lure customers. Check out the hay ride and the moon bounce and the apple dumplings and the Morris dancers and the goats and the corn maze and goodness knows what else.
Is a 30-second tweet really the straw that breaks the camel's back?
To get your feet wet, start a twitter account. It's quick and easy, which is why I recommended it back in 2012.
Ping me, @adapples, and I'll follow you; when you tweet news of apples, I'll help spread the word.
Don't hide your crop under a bushel basket! Let the apple-loving public know that you have the goods—by telling us.
That is just straight up good business advice. To have a successful business, you have to communicate with your customers the way they communicate, currently that's Facebook and Twitter.
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