Hometown Tourists: Royal Farms in Ellsworth

It’s that time of year when crisp apples hang from the trees, the smell of donuts fills the air, and you just want to take a trip to a farm and experience the outdoors and the joys of the fall harvest.

In this week’s Hometown Tourist we take you to for a peek at this family run farm that has a love for agriculture at its heart.

Sara McGuire and her husband learned after a couple of crop disasters as young farmers that, sometimes, by virtue of the business, the harvest isn’t always perfect.

So they diversified.

“Which was the first of a couple more to come, but very unusual, but as young farmers we knew we had to throw ourselves into diversifying the farm. We’ve just kind of gone down that path of where our passions have taken us,” said owner Sara McGuire.

Now visiting Royal Farms you’ll find pretty much everything under the sun that grows, but you’ll also find gourmet baked goods like pies and pasties, canned goods of some of their favorite concoctions, and wine and cider.

“We have one that we call hand-picked that we consider sort of our flagship. It’s made with all those heritage apples, I was talking about but we have some fun flavors. And caramel apple is exciting going into the fall this is a new flavor for us, it’s got just enough caramel and real buttery,” said McGuire.

Everything comes full circle here, from u-pick, to being able to walk the vineyards and orchards with wine or cider, to see where it all stemmed from.

There’s a scavenger corn maze too, if you’re up for the challenge.

“When you go into the maze, we send you off with a challenge of finding a certain amount of stations in a certain amount of time, and then we have prizes when you come out,” said McGuire.

Sara says sometimes its wild to look back at how much they’ve grown, but they love what they do whether its contributing food or home made goods to the community, or just providing a place to laugh and enjoy the outdoors and fall in northern Michigan.

“We are, I think we’re really lucky to be doing what we’re doing, because we love it and we feel really passionate about it. I know not everyone loves to go to work in the morning, and my husband and I both really do. We work really hard, but we love to go to work and we love to teach our kids what hard work is,” said McGuire.