The term “Big Apple” started out in the 1920s as racetrack slang for winning a jackpot, but it was jazz musicians in the decades that followed who made it a nickname for New York that stuck. If you got a steady gig in the City that Never Sleeps, you’d plucked that apple, made it to the big time. It was thus mere coincidence, but most appropriate, that Manhattan is technically where the Hudson Valley ends, and that the Hudson Valley has been a major apple-growing region for centuries. And nowadays, in early autumn, it’s a magnet for day-trippers who want to sink their teeth into the fabled fruit that tempted Adam and Eve, Atalanta and Isaac Newton.

A week or two before the leaf-peepers begin to converge on our region, orchards and farmstands are already jumping with visitors who want to pi

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