Little River Orchard

Our take

The short version

Little River Orchard, in the small Lookout Mountain town of Mentone in DeKalb County, is the best-documented listing in this Alabama batch — and it’s worth explaining why. Nearly every fact here comes directly from the orchard’s own website, checked on the exact date this record was compiled, and it includes something most listings in this dataset lack: an explicit, dated 2026 season range (June 26 through October 3) rather than a vague seasonal description.

Eleven varieties, spread across the whole season

The variety list here is unusually long and unusually specific for a small mountain-town orchard: Pristine, Zestar!, Honeycrisp, Early Fuji, Jonagold, Golden Russet, Galarina, Winecrisp, Fuji, Sundance, and Pink Lady. That’s eleven named apples, and the spread matters — Pristine is a true early-summer apple, which lines up with the season’s June 26 start date, while Pink Lady is one of the latest-ripening dessert apples grown anywhere, consistent with a season that runs into early October. In between, Honeycrisp and Jonagold anchor the mid-season stretch. The practical takeaway: what you can pick on opening weekend in late June will be genuinely different fruit from what’s ready in late September, so if you have a favorite variety, it’s worth asking which weeks it’s likely to be at its best.

A tight, three-day-a-week schedule

This is not a daily-access orchard. The confirmed hours are Friday 9am-4pm, Saturday 9am-4pm, and Sunday 12pm-4pm — closed Monday through Thursday for the entire season. That’s a meaningful planning constraint: there’s no midweek option here, so a weekday detour to Mentone won’t get you into the rows even during the peak of the season. Build your trip around a Friday-through-Sunday window from the start.

U-pick only, no shortcuts

Unlike many orchards in this dataset that offer both pick-your-own and pre-picked fruit as a fallback, the record marks pre_picked as false here. If you’re not up for walking the rows yourself — whether due to mobility, time, or preference — this may not be the right stop, since there’s no confirmed pre-picked alternative on file.

More than an apple stop

The activities list reads like a real family-day plan rather than an afterthought: an Apple Cannon, a giant jump pad, ping pong, and general farm games. Combined with the fact that the same property also runs u-pick blackberries, flowers, sweet corn, tomatoes, watermelon, and pumpkins, Little River functions less like a single-crop apple orchard and more like a working multi-crop farm that happens to have an unusually deep apple variety list. Depending on when in the season you visit, you may find yourself picking apples and tomatoes, or apples and pumpkins, on the same trip.

What’s genuinely missing

For a record this well-documented, the gaps are narrower than most listings in this batch, but they exist: no pricing is stated anywhere on file, for admission, per-pound or per-bag apple costs, or any of the other u-pick crops. There’s also no cider mill and no cider donuts confirmed (both fields are marked false), so if a cider-focused visit is the goal, this isn’t the stop for it. Budget for the visit as an unknown and expect to pay on arrival.

Getting there

Little River Orchard is at 4594 E River Rd in Mentone, DeKalb County, on Lookout Mountain in northeast Alabama. The coordinates on file are a Mentone city-center estimate rather than a geocoded point for the exact address.

Bottom line

This is the record to trust most in this batch — dated 2026 season confirmed straight from the source, eleven named varieties spanning the full season, and a genuine kids’ activity lineup. The only real planning constraints are the narrow Friday-Sunday window and the complete absence of pricing information, so bring flexibility on days and be ready to ask about cost when you arrive.