Welcome to Outside Play a monthly feature on JDaniel4’s Mom that is co-hosted by several other wonderful blogs. This month the focus is on apples. If you have a post on apple picking, visiting a orchard, an outdoor game with apples, a picnic featuring apple related foods or any other apple play, please take a moment and link it up below.

JDaniel and I headed to SkyTop Orchards in North Carolina last week to pick apples and explore all the wonderful play areas it has. He didn’t know we were going ahead of time. I actually didn’t decide until Friday morning while he was in school to go.

It was such a pretty ride heading north. JDaniel silently looked at the beautiful clouds and mountains as I drove.

SkyTop is such a pretty orchard. We had never been there before. Friends had raved that it was the place to go to get apples. It didn’t disappoint.

You have to walk down hill from the store area to the apples. There are over ten different kinds of apples in various areas of the orchard.  Many of the trees on the left were not ready for picking. The trees are the right were and so that is where we headed.

JDaniel took charge of the basket they gave us for gathering apples on the way down the hill toward the Jonathan Gold. An apple guide in the store had said that the trees in that section would be just the right size for JDaniel to pick apples from all by himself.

They were right. JDaniel was able to gather a basket full of apples without even having to stand on his tiptoes. The Jonathan Gold trees were loaded down with beautiful apples.

Once the basket was filled, the task of carrying the apples shifted to me. Actually a basket filled with apples is really heavy I don’t blame JDaniel for not wanting to carry it. When you visit apple orchards all the apple seem to call to you and you end up with heavy baskets.

Then we headed over to check out the goats who didn’t seem to hold JDaniel’s attention and the bamboo forest which did.

JDaniel wanted to know if there were pandas in the forest. I told him that there are not enough pandas in the from there to be some everywhere there is bamboo in the world.

The best part of the bamboo forest was this little bridge. It looked like we were entering a foreign land while crossing it.

If you have an outdoor post with an apple or apple orchards theme you would like to link up, please take a moment and add the badge below to it.