This Month's Featured Destination:

Enjoy An Apple Cider Slush
at the Oldest Commercial Fruit Farm in Kansas

Original barn at Rees Fruit Farm

What’s the best way to beat the heat? Many folks around Topeka think it’s a “Sweet Apple Cider Slush,” available only at the Rees Fruit Farm of Rex and Shannon Rees, located at the junction of K-24 and K-4.

“My customers range from teenagers—just learning how to drive—that come out here for a sweet apple cider slush, to folks in their 70s who have been coming to our farm all their lives,” Rex said.

“The very first ice slush machine was invented right here in Topeka in the 1960s by a fellow named Clarence Wilch, and my father, Norris Rees, bought the fourth slush machine ever made,” he said. “Dad said he didn’t have anything else to mix with it but pure apple cider. We’ve been selling them ever since.”

The sweet apple cider slush has absolutely no additives, not even water or sugar. All it needs is crushed ice and apple cider. They use a rack and cloth cider press purchased in the 1960s to press the cider, with large windows so visitors can watch the process. All the cider is UV pasteurized before it is sold to the public.

The Rees Fruit Farm has a 2,500 sq. foot roadside market open year-round, specializing in apples, peaches, and berries, but moving more and more to additional fruits, and lots of vegetables. Dating the family farm back to approximately 1882 and the orchard to about 1901, Rex says that their’s is the oldest commercial fruit farm in Kansas.

“About 90% of our business today is retail at the roadside market or at three farmers’ markets in Topeka,” he said. “My wholesale business now is almost entirely apple cider, sold to groceries in about a 30-mile radius from the farm.”

Rex also had found an interesting market for fruit hardwoods to be used for smoking meat on the barbeque grill. He said that when they take out an apple tree, a cord of the wood sells for about $300 to out-of-town buyers. The limbs sell in the market for $7.95 a bushel, and even the sawdust sells for 39 cents a pound. He said he has apple trees planted not for the apples, but specifically for the wood. The apple market has changed too much.

Rex said his father used to have 10 varieties of summer apples alone, such as the Lodi apples that Rex grows. These early varieties were ripe and up for sale in late July. Rex refers to these as “summer cooking apples,” which he describes as “good for apple sauce, but not as tasty as the apples that come later.” These summer apples used to be popular just because they were the first apples of the year, but times have changed.

“Apples have become a commodity, and though the ones in the grocery stores certainly aren’t quite as good as those grown locally and picked fresh, you can get a pretty decent apple year round now” he lamented. “We put in 12 months of labor for a fairly short harvest season, so when you combine that with the commodity situation, it’s time to diversify.”

To read the rest of this story, click here.

---

Moore Ranch Makes Good News from Bad News

Sometimes you get a chance for publicity when you least expect it, like when a reporter wanted to do a story about the drought.

He turned to Joe and Nancy Moore, who turned a story about the drought into a nice article about the ranch, and their agritourism program!

This story, written by the Topeka Capital Journal, was picked up on the AP Wire Services and circulated by a number of papers, including the Wichita Eagle.

Click here to read the story online.

Are you ready for a phone call from the newspaper, radio, or tv?

Check your media readiness...click here to go to the article "What to Do When the Media Calls."