Shady Brook Farm

Our take

What the record actually confirms

Shady Brook Farm sits on Stony Hill Road in Yardley, in Bucks County, and it’s better known for its fall festival than for apple picking specifically — a century-old operation built around corn mazes, pumpkins, and family activities, with apple picking folded in as one part of a bigger fall visit. According to the orchard’s own website, pick-your-own fields are open Wednesday through Sunday, 9am to 3:30pm. Four apple varieties are named directly on the site: Fuji, Gala, Honeycrisp, and Cortland. A wagon ride carries pickers out to the orchard rows, and the farm’s broader FallFest programming is confirmed as part of the operation.

How the pricing actually works

This is the detail that most separates Shady Brook from a typical u-pick orchard: apple picking is included with FallFest admission rather than sold as its own ticket. If you want to keep the apples you pick, they’re sold separately by weight — so the total cost of a visit is FallFest admission plus whatever you pick, not a single all-in apple-picking fee. No specific admission price shows up in this record, which makes it hard to say in advance exactly what a family visit costs. If your goal is simply to pick a bag of apples as cheaply as possible, this bundled structure likely costs more than a standalone orchard charging a flat bag price — but if you were planning to visit the fall festival anyway for the corn maze and pumpkins, apple picking here is effectively an add-on to a trip you’d already be taking.

What’s ripe when you visit

The four named varieties span a useful stretch of the apple calendar. Gala, Honeycrisp, and Cortland are all mid-season apples, typically overlapping through the heart of fall, while Fuji tends to ripen later in the season. That spread suggests Shady Brook keeps something available across a fairly wide window rather than concentrating everything into one narrow peak — useful if you’re trying to time a visit for a specific variety, though the site doesn’t say which of the four is ready on any given week. A phone call would normally be the way to check that, but no confirmed phone number turned up for this listing, so shadybrookfarm.com itself is the more reliable channel for current status.

Getting to the orchard

The wagon ride detail is worth planning around if you have younger kids or anyone who’d struggle to walk a longer distance to the trees. It also reinforces that this is a bigger, more infrastructure-heavy operation than a small family farm stand — consistent with a century-old farm that runs a full seasonal festival rather than a simple picking field.

What’s missing, and why it matters

The PYO-apples page links out to individual 2026-dated event listings, including one for Friday, September 4, 2026, which at least confirms picking is active by early September. But there’s no full season-start or season-end date posted on the main page itself, so it’s not clear how long the window runs past that point, or whether it opens any earlier. There’s also no confirmed phone number, which is a real gap if you need to ask a quick question rather than digging through the website. And critically, no FallFest admission price is stated anywhere in this record, which is the one number you’d most want before deciding whether this trip fits your budget compared to a simpler flat-bag orchard.

Bottom line

Shady Brook Farm makes the most sense as part of a bigger fall outing — corn maze, pumpkins, wagon ride, and apple picking together — rather than as a quick, cheap apple run. The variety list (Fuji, Gala, Honeycrisp, Cortland) covers a decent stretch of the season, but the bundled FallFest pricing model means you should go in expecting to pay for the full festival experience, not just a bag of apples. Confirm the admission price and exact 2026 dates on shadybrookfarm.com before you commit to the drive.