I friend had recommended Stuart’s Farm as a great place to get plants. We’d had a stretch of bad weather, which suddenly turned better so on a glorious, sunny day off we went.

According to its website:

Stuart’s Fruit Farm is a family-operated farm since 1828 located in Westchester County, New York. It is about an hour away from New York City. The farm began as cattle farm and evolved to an agricultural farm.

Depending on your seasonal needs; visit us in the spring to buy a varied selection of flowers and vegetable plants, the autumn for apple picking, peach picking and visiting the pumpkin patch, and in the winter for Christmas trees.

Visiting Stuart’s Fruit Farm in the autumn is an exceptional time of the year. Aside from the perfect apple picking with an array of apples take a hayride around the orchard and visit the farm stand to buy fresh produce and the bakery for delicious apple cider donuts and homemade pies baked daily. Finally, before heading home have a picnic with your family to enjoy the beautiful fall foliage.

It is, indeed, a lovely place – old weathered gas pumps; the inevitable red barn; lots of brightly colored tractors; and of course the vegetables and flowers (some of which we took home).

Unfortunately, the bakery was not open, which was a pity as I was a bit ‘peckish’.

Taken with a Sony RX-100 M3.

I hadn’t been for a walk around Ossining in five or six years, but a couple of weeks ago the weather was lovely and my wife had gone out shopping. She had the car so I decided to take the dog for a walk down to the Ossining waterfront.

During our walk the signs of Spring were everywhere – trees and flowers were blooming. When we first moved to this area about twenty years ago I recall thinking of Ossining as a fairly typical old Hudson River town: a bit seedy, not terribly interesting and economically a bit depressed.

A lot has changed since then. An earlier post (See: Ossining Boat and Canoe Club) described the effects of urban renewal in the 1970s:

We went to see presentation on “Historic Downtown Ossining” given by the Ossining Town Historian. Very interesting if a little long – at least it seemed that way but that might be because we were very hungry. The presentation showed how a large part of downtown Ossining was lost to urban renewal and in 1970s. One entire side of main street disappeared and wasn’t really replaced with much. Very Sad. A lot of old photographs were shown, many in the form of before/after shots. It’s startling how much was lost.

Many of the historical buildings in Ossining have now been incorporated into a scenic tour, each one described by a historical marker such as the one above. A number of new restaurants have opened up, including “3 Westerly“, which has a particularly scenic location right on the renovated waterfront. A new park has opened along Ossining Kill featuring the interesting double arched viaduct.

Taken with a Sony RX-100 M3.