Red Apple Farm smells of wood smoke, manure and freshly-pressed apples. Families and the occasional college student traipse from farm to orchard clutching eight-foot apple pickers.

"Here, take a picker, there aren't many apples left down low," says the worker handing out buckets and pickers--modified broomsticks with baskets to catch the apples--to the occasional harvester.

According to a chart distributed by the farm, MacIntosh apples ripen by Sept. 1. Fallen and discarded apples crunched underfoot by last weekend.

"Apples like cold weather," says farmer William E. Rose. "A couple of weeks ago when we had hot weather the apples were dropping, just falling out of the tree."

Founded in 1732, Red Apple Farm grows 36 apple varieties according to Rose, who is the third-generation owner of the Phillipston, Mass., farm.

"I like to call myself a caretaker," Rose says, adding that his son is now studying agriculture at Cornell University and will likely return to run the farm.

"We'll get another generation around here," Rose says.

After he returned home from a stint in Peru teaching entomology on a Fulbright scholarship, Rose earned a Ph.D. in forestry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

"I'm fluent in Spanish and I have all these degrees, but I came back to the farm," Rose says. "I've worked all over the world, and it's pretty hard to beat New England."

The Autumn Bounty

Red Apple Farm presses its own apples into sweet cider and hard cider. The sweet apple scent drifts through the chill air in the wooden barn that serves as factory, bakery and shop.

Customers can take home jams, jellies and spreads, and freshly-baked apple dumplings, pies and cider donuts. A sign in the barn advertises "everlasting bouquets"--dried flower bunches that hang from the rafters. A collection of cider bottles from around the world lines one of the barn's wooden beams.

"I know to get people here you have to retain the old farm image," Rose says.

"They're not just coming for the apples. They're coming for the fall, for New England."

The Buchanan family, from Westminster, Mass., makes an annual visit to Red Apple Farm. Fifteen-month-old Bridgette M. Buchanan tasted her first apple at the farm last year. This year, she graduated to a roasted ear of corn.