[upbeat music] - The experience that people have when they arrive at Old Orchard Creek I'm sure is much like the experience that we had when we came here.

We have a little bit of trepidation about coming up a single lane dirt road, up into a mountain valley that looks like it has a dead end and it does, which is the blueberry field.

People just camp out and hang out by the creeks and really just have an amazing time.

- My name is Walter Clark.

I'm co-owner of Old Orchard Creek Farm, here in Lansing, North Carolina.

- And I'm Johnny Burleson, the other co-owner of Old Orchard Creek.

We can't imagine being any other place.

Old Orchard Creek is a historic Appalachian farm that dates to the 1880s.

It has had a you-pick blueberry operation for close to 75 years.

We've owned the farm since 2003.

I say we've owned it, we became stewards of the farm in 2003.

- Place like this, you really never own.

You're caretakers for a short period of time.

We are lucky to be caretakers of this place.

We have two cottages here on the property, both are vacation rentals.

One of the cottages actually was built in the 1950s.

We renovated that house completely after we bought the farm.

And the other cottage we built from the ground up.

- The General Store was sort of a COVID project.

We decided to make branded jams and dry goods, labeled or branded to the farm Old Orchard Creek.

And it was very popular and we thought, well, we should probably have a storefront.

And we found an old building that was for sale.

It was the old, original General Store in the local adjacent town of Lansing.

And we bought that building and opened what we call a modern general store.

It's a coffee shop.

Walter curates an amazing book section.

- I think the community's really excited about it.

We're excited about it.

Lansing is one of the places that people say there is an energy vortex.

I mean, what you see when you come to Lansing is a small town that was a railroad town but there's Big Horse Creek, which runs right through town.

- It has some of the best trout fishing in the state.

It's a brilliant spot.

So Molley Chomper is a local cidery here in Lansing and we've had a very close relationship with them really since the beginning.

- So Tim Arscott, I'm one of the owners and the lead cider maker here at Molley Chomper.

Molley is a fictitious goat.

When we planted apples and got the farm, we thought we would get some goats and the folks that sold us the apple trees that we had first put in place said that getting goats is a really bad idea 'cause they would eat all of our apples.

Well, we met Johnny and Walter picking blueberries on their farm before we actually started the cidery and we had the idea after chatting with them, why don't we do a blueberry wine or a fruit wine using the blueberries?

We had no idea what to do with blueberries, but we decided we'd ferment the berries like a red wine, where you ferment whole fruit, and it turned out to be a really delicious cider.

It's got lots of blueberry flavor, it's a beautiful color.

I think it's just a great showcase of the fruit from the farm.

- One of their first batches of apple cider was made from, basically, gleaned apples from our 300 apple trees that are not in production, but they still have good product for cider.

So they gleaned those and really made one of their first batches of cider.

So we've kept that relationship.

- And one of the really fun things about our relationship with Molley Chomper is that you see the blueberries being harvested here in the field.

They go to Molley Chomper and they're made into something and they come back to us in the form of cider.

It's one of the wonderful things about farming is seeing something that's harvested on your farm, it's sent someplace, it's made into something and it comes back as a different product.

And one of the wonderful things about living in a local community where you can actually see that sort of thing happen.

And one of the most special things about walking out the door here is being able to walk out on that second story porch and you can hear the creek running through the apple orchard which gave the farm its name, Old Orchard Creek.

Walking out that door at sunset and watching the sun set to the west is just spectacular.

- When I walk out the front door to drive to other work in some other part of the state, I look at the orchard of apple trees that you step right into it, you overlook it, and there's probably, I dunno, a hundred trees there.

I look there and I always look to the left up to the blueberries, up to the top of the ridge and just the length of that view reminds me of why I'm going to work, to be able to take care of this place.

- Old Orchard Creek Farm is at 410 Swansie Shepherd Road in Lansing.

For more information about berry picking, rental cabins and the General Store, visit their website at oldorchardcreek.com.