Carter Mountain apple orchard
— the week the trees turn red and people drive up.
Not only on a wall.
Carter Mountain apple orchard, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“An apple orchard at seventeen hundred feet, looking down on Monticello and across to the Blue Ridge. The Chiles family has farmed this shoulder of Carter's Mountain since 1912. By late August the early Galas are ready and the gravel road up the mountain fills with families carrying picking bags. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Carter Mountain Orchard sits at roughly seventeen hundred feet on the north shoulder of Carter's Mountain, in Albemarle County just south of Charlottesville. The orchard has been farmed by the Chiles family since 1912 and is one of several Chiles Family Orchards in central Virginia. The hillside ranges over apples, peaches, and sour cherries. The summit road climbs from Route 53, the Thomas Jefferson Parkway, with Monticello directly below to the north and the long blue line of the Blue Ridge filling the western horizon.
Peach picking opens in late June and runs through August on the lower rows. The earliest apples, Ginger Gold and Gala, start in mid-August and pull crowds up the mountain by Labor Day weekend. Honeycrisp and Fuji ripen through September into early October, when the leaves of the Blue Ridge across the valley turn copper. The orchard sells cider doughnuts, hard cider from the bottom of the hill, and apple butter pressed on-site. Last picking on most varieties is the last weekend of October.
The orchard is reached by a switchback gravel road off Route 53, two miles up from the Monticello gates. On peak fall weekends Albemarle County manages traffic from the bottom of the hill, and the farm runs timed-entry tickets to keep the road moving. Weekday mornings are quiet, and the view across to Monticello and the Blue Ridge is best before noon, before the haze rises. The Sunset Series runs Thursday evenings in summer, with live music on the deck and a long view of the western sky.
