Verger Labonte

The farm is pretty and at first inviting. Then you pay to go in and pick and realize you are picking with hundreds of people on about 10 – 15 trees. Total !
The orchard is huge but they only let you pick from a dozen trees. Staff were pretty unfriendly and the picking experience is pretty lame. Has to be a better option for apple picking.

Would have given 3 stars, but the picking area was shockingly small and, without intervention on my part, we would have left with disgusting apples, so 2 it is.
Went apple picking today with my wife and daughter. We had a good time, but it started off really poorly.
Only 3 kinds of apples available for picking: Macintosh, Spartan, and my favourite, Cortland. We checked to make sure Cortlands were ready before going. On arrival, we found that there was only one row of them, but noticed that every 4 – 5 trees there was yellow caution tape. As we came in, we were told that we were not supposed to cross the yellow tape «because staff were picking up apples that fell off the trees last night.» Bullshit. The fact that there were many lines of tape (and that those trees were full of much better apples than the ones we had access to suggests that, in fact, they were either saving those apples for other purposes or other clients, or that they were rationing their selection for future weekends. If the latter was the case, fine, but be up front about it. Be honest. I prefer honesty to a lame excuse that doesn’t hold water.
I crossed the line. I picked some beautiful Cortland apples. Some people followed me into the no-​picking zone. I’m bad, I know. I got out, and the others were asked to leave that area. I asked the girl with the secret service walkie-​talkie to just cut the tape and let us at the good apples. She agreed. From that point on, things were better.
The Spartan didn’t interest us, and there seemed to be a lot of Macintosh, but the first experience of the day (20 minutes trying to respect the «rules» and finding crap) was hard to get past. Our previous apple picking experiences were at places that were teeming with rows and rows and rows of apples without any yellow tape in sight. This was weird, and wrong.
My daughter enjoyed the animal farm at the front, for about the 20 minutes that it was worth.
Biggest advantage about Verger Labonte was its proximity to the West Island. We have previously gone to the townships. I don’t know what we’ll do next year, but if we go back to Labonte, it’ll be for the shortness of the drive and it will have to be with MUCH lower expectations.