Blake's Orchard & Cider Mill

Our take

What the record actually confirms

Blake’s Orchard & Cider Mill sits on 120 acres at 17985 Armada Center Rd in Armada, Macomb County — one of the larger agritourism operations covered anywhere in this file. The record describes a farm growing 40+ apple varieties, with a tasting room, restaurant, and lavender market built around the orchard and cider mill, plus a Funland play area for kids. General hours are listed as 8am to 6pm, seven days a week. The phone number on file is 586-784-5343 and the website is blakefarms.com/orchard-cider-mill.

This is a meaningfully different kind of stop than a bare picking field. Between the restaurant, tasting room, and lavender market, it reads as built for a half-day visit rather than a quick in-and-out for a bag of apples.

The $20 minimum and how pricing works

One specific, checkable detail carried over directly from Blake’s own u-pick page: fruit is weighed and paid for on departure, and a $20 minimum purchase applies. That’s a concrete number to budget around, even though there’s no per-pound rate given in the record — you’re paying by weight, with $20 as the floor rather than a fixed price per bag.

Early varieties, and a real gap on the full list

The record names four varieties tied specifically to the u-pick page: Ginger Gold, Zestar, Paula Red, and Early Jonathan — all early-season apples that typically ripen in late July and August. That matches the July 23 start date listed for this location. The research notes mention the farm grows 40+ varieties in total across its 120 acres, but only these four early ones were actually named on the page checked, so there’s no way to say from this record what’s available later in the season, such as Honeycrisp or Fuji timing here specifically.

A contradiction worth taking seriously

Here’s the part of this record that matters most for trip planning: the researcher found two different pages on blakefarms.com telling two different stories. The dedicated u-pick page listed a July 23 start date and current early varieties, suggesting u-pick was open. The main orchard-and-cider-mill page, at the same time, displayed a “closed for season” u-pick banner. Neither page was corrected to match the other during the research pass, and the record flags this explicitly as likely stale or cached content rather than a genuine, resolved answer about current status.

That’s not a small caveat. It means this record genuinely cannot tell you with confidence whether u-pick is open on a given day you might plan to visit — only that at some point it opens around July 23 for the season. A phone call to 586-784-5343 before driving out is the only way to actually resolve which of those two page’s Blake’s own site would confirm.

Location relative to Blake’s other Michigan site

Blake’s operates a second, related property covered elsewhere in this file: Blake’s Lyon Township in South Lyon, roughly an hour to the southwest in Oakland County, which opened about two weeks later in the season per its own record. If you’re comparing the two under the same brand, Armada is the larger, more amenity-heavy flagship location, while Lyon Township (formerly the independent Erwin Orchards) appears to be a smaller, more recently rebranded site.

Bottom line for planning

Blake’s Orchard & Cider Mill in Armada is a legitimate, large-scale agritourism destination with real specifics to plan around — a $20 u-pick minimum and four named early varieties starting around July 23. But the conflicting messaging found on the farm’s own site about whether u-pick is currently open is a genuine unresolved gap, not a minor formatting issue, and it’s worth a phone call before you commit to the drive.