Same family, same location, since 1970!

In 1965, Great Grandpa George and Great Grandma Jane Conniff came to the east side of the bluff and found a piece of ground standing in wheat, fed by a spring. They bought it from the Cools, one of Green Bluff's founding homestead families, and began turning ground into a fruit farm.

George started with Christmas trees, then young apple, peach, and cherry trees — planted knowing it would be years before any of them bore fruit. That first fruit finally came in 1970, and he sold it from an upturned bin, right there among the trees in the heart of his orchard.

In 1980, George and Jane's daughter Karene and her husband Terry took up the work, buying an adjacent well-loved orchard from George's nephew, Jerry McGlade. They built a retail shop and a commercial kitchen, filling it with the smell of pies, jam, cider, and apple butter — Terry stirring the kettle by hand for eighteen hours at a stretch. They raised three children on that ground, and in time opened its rows to other people's children too, through Educational Fall Harvest Tours — so a schoolchild from town might learn firsthand how good food is grown.

When Terry passed before his time, George and Karene carried the work forward. In 2008, Terry and Karene's son Nick took his place in that line, adding thirteen acres and new crops.

In the years since, the farm has kept growing — honeyberries and blueberries newly planted, squash fields now twenty-five acres, and a gathering venue raised on the property, built not to replace the farm but to stand beside it, a place for the 4th generation to build something of their own.

Nearly twenty thousand children still come through each fall on field trips. Families who once bought fruit from George's upturned bin now bring their grandchildren, and in some cases their great-grandchildren, back to the very same trees.

We've watched many other farms on this bluff rise and fall over the years, the way orchards sometimes do. Ours has remained. Four generations deep, we're still tending the same ground — and we will, for as long as the ground will have us.