Green Bluff farms bounce back just in time for fall after last year’s cold snap devastated stone fruits

Grabbing the kids and heading to Green Bluff is a tradition for Spokane families.

Kayla Jauregui started going to Walter’s Fruit Ranch when she was around 4 years old. Now she and her husband, Alfred, and their three kids make the trek to Green Bluff every year to pick apples, peaches and enjoy the wide variety of kid-friendly activities available.

“Of course, we like picking the apples and …” Jauregui explained before her 7-year-old son Harrison blurted out “Eating them!”

The family aims to take home half a box of Honeycrisp apples, which are a favorite across all farms in Green Bluff. They expect those apples to last less than a month .

Most years they go to Walter’s Fruit Ranch for their peaches, but by the end of September, most of the peach trees are barren. Peak peach season spans from the end of July to around Labor Day, said Morghan Morrell, the owner of Walter’s.

Last year, a relatively warm December followed immediately by a January cold snap killed all the buds of stone fruits in the region. This year was different. Morrell said there was a bumper crop of cherries, an amazing yield of peaches and apples are shaping up to be a great crop as well.

Morrell has worked at Walter’s since 2003. Her husband, Jason, does much of the outside work, while she mostly does inside work. But from time to time, she can be spotted driving a tractor around. After all, managing a farm is a family venture that requires everyone be ready all the time.

“My sister worked here at the time, and I would just come up and visit her on the weekends,” Morghan Morrell said, recalling what life was like when she was 20. “I had a full-time job. And my now father-in-law said, ‘Morghan, if you’re gonna keep coming up here on the weekends, I’m putting you to work.’ And my first job here was selling pumpkins out of the pumpkin patch.”

Morghan and Jason Morrell started dating two years after she began working at Walter’s in 2005. They got married in 2008 and now have four kids who help out on the farm. During the busy season, Walter’s has 45 to 50 employees. She said 75% of their profit for the year comes from just the month of October, but they are busy fixing equipment, planting and running all other facets of the farm the rest of the year.

During an average day at Walter’s, parents wait for a tractor tugging along little kids, or what is known as the Wiggle Worm, to make its way back from the orchard. There is live music playing, another tractor ride more suitable for adults called the Fruitloop Express that gives visitors a tour of the area, seven vendors offering everything from elephant ears to face painting, and a 4-acre corn maze.

Across the 50 acres of Walter’s, 36 are farmland for pumpkins, Christmas trees, apples, peaches and more. Morrell said that most people come to their farm to pick peaches, specifically a kind of peach that her father-in-law calls a “bend-over peach” because it is so juicy, a person has to bend over while eating it or they risk dowsing themselves in sweet peach juice.

Jasper Fields is a junior at Riverside High School working at Walter’s. He lives about 3 miles away as the crow flies on a 40-acre farm. While manning the corn cannon, Fields spoke about how much he enjoyed working at Walter’s.

“I mean, I get to watch people have fun,” Fields said. “There’ll be parts of the day where I have to go do, obviously, actual labor, where I pick up pumpkins or I move straw bales. But I love working here.”

The corn cannon he oversees is a compressed air device that shoots corn hundreds of yards. The goal is to land a corncob in a bucket, and the winner gets $100. Morghan Morrell said they usually have around four winners every summer.

Walter’s Fruit Ranch, Big Barn Brewing, Hidden Acres Orchards and Beck’s Harvest House are four of the larger farms in Green Bluff whose owners’ primary, and often sole, way of making money is through their farm.

Todd Beck said his family bought the 37-acre farm that is now Beck’s Harvest House in 1987. On the farm, they sell apples, cherries, peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, raspberries, rhubarb, blackberries and have a huge garden with an assortment of all different kinds of vegetables, from cucumbers to carrots to beets and more. They also have a kid-friendly area, 25 to 30 vendors, a restaurant and different musical artists regularly performing for guests.

As a part of the Fall Festival, Beck’s Harvest House provides a whole range of things to do every weekend starting in the middle of September and lasting until the end of October. Since every farm on Green Bluff is an independent business, Beck said that each farm does Fall Festival a little different.

At its peak, he estimates Beck’s Harvest House gets between 4,000 and 5,000 visitors every Saturday and Sunday during Fall Festival. His security guard, who has done crowd control in the past, said that number is a bit conservative and believes the real number is closer to 8,000. For this reason, Beck suggests eager Green Bluff-goers should order their tickets online and plan ahead.

Similar to Walter’s Fruit Ranch, last year Beck’s Harvest House didn’t have any peaches. Before that season, they had never lost 100% of a single crop. But because of the diversity of the products they offer, Beck believes they were a lot better off than some smaller farms in the area.

For Beck, the Harvest House is more than just his job; it’s his and his family’s life.

“It’s not just what we do, it’s who we are,” Beck said. “It’s our identity… It’s hard to describe unless you experience it, because it’s not a day-to-day job, it’s not an ‘Oh, what time do I have to be at work today?’ You know, beyond that, you’re just a part of everything that’s going on. Teaching that to our kids about the future and life, and you make the decisions you make, and that you’re doing something that you want to do. Have it be your livelihood, not just your job.”