Every September, cars line up along Sound Avenue with reusable bags in the back seat, ready to fill them with apples at Harbes. Most of those bags come home empty of apples. Not because the trees are picked clean. Because the Mattituck location doesn't grow apples for picking at all.
That single fact reorganizes how a fall Saturday in this neighborhood should actually work. Harbes Family Farm isn't one property with everything under one roof. It's three separate addresses, each built around a different crop, and the one most people default to happens to be the one without an orchard.
Mattituck Is the Pumpkin Address, Not the Apple Address
Harbes Family Farm & Vineyard sits at 715 Sound Avenue in Mattituck, marking its 30th anniversary season this year. It's the address people think of first because it's the biggest production: the Barnyard Adventure, the Wine Barn, the farmstand, the pig races. What it doesn't have is an apple orchard. The farm's own visitor guidance is direct about it. Apple picking isn't offered at this location, full stop.
What Mattituck does have is pumpkins and corn. The Barnyard Pumpkin Patch covers seven acres of on-the-vine pumpkins and gourds, and the property's fall corn maze runs a Wizard of Oz theme this season, a different design from the mazes at the farm's other two locations. The grand seasonal opening of that pumpkin patch lands on a specific two-day window: Saturday, September 28, and Sunday, September 29, both days 10am to 6pm. Expect the Barnyard's usual singing hayrides, live music in the courtyard, pig races, and a donut-eating contest for kids twelve and under, twice daily.
New this year, the Barnyard has added two mini Highland cows, named Mocha and Maisie through a public naming contest, on display daily from 10am to 5pm with a bookable animal encounter. There's also a new Harbes Harvest Express, a trackless train that tours the 100-acre farm on weekends and comes included with weekend and holiday combo admission. Between the cows and the train, this year's additions lean toward things you watch rather than things you pick, which fits the location's actual identity: Mattituck is the show farm. The picking happens elsewhere.
Where the Apples Actually Are
If a bag of apples is the point of the trip, the destination is either Harbes Orchard in Riverhead at 5698 Sound Avenue or Harbes Farms Jamesport at 1223 Route 25. They're not backup locations. They're the only two Harbes properties where you can pick fruit off a tree.
The two orchards aren't interchangeable either. Jamesport's orchard grows Honeycrisp exclusively, and its corn maze this season carries an America 250 design built around the flag and the Statue of Liberty. Riverhead's orchard is the broader stop, part of a lineup where more than 27 apple varieties ripen at different points across the season, so the exact varieties available shift week to week depending on when you visit.
Riverhead runs a different weekly rhythm than Mattituck too. During September and October it's open daily, Monday through Friday 10am to 5pm and weekends and holidays 10am to 6pm, shorter hours than the Mattituck flagship, which stays open daily 10am to 6pm through most of the season and pushes to 7pm on Friday through Sunday in summer before tightening to 5pm-only days in November.
Here's how the four stops on this stretch of the North Fork actually break down this fall:
| Location | Address | What You Do There | Fall Hours | The Catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Harbes Family Farm & Vineyard | 715 Sound Ave, Mattituck | Pumpkin patch, Wizard of Oz corn maze, Barnyard, Wine Barn, mini Highland cows | Daily 10am–6pm through the season | No apple picking here |
| Harbes Orchard | 5698 Sound Ave, Riverhead | Apple picking, 27+ varieties across the season | Mon–Fri 10am–5pm, weekends/holidays 10am–6pm | Varieties rotate week to week |
| Harbes Farms Jamesport | 1223 NY-25, Jamesport | Honeycrisp-only apple picking, America 250 corn maze, 9-acre pumpkin patch | Weekends & holidays, hours vary | Apple bags are 3 lb; extra fruit picked is charged separately |
| Wickham's Fruit Farm | 28700 Main Rd, Cutchogue | Pick-your-own peaches and berries, farm stand | Farmstand Mon–Sat 9am–5pm, closed Sundays; PYO Fri/Sat 10am–3pm only | Picking is weather and supply dependent, call ahead |
Across the Street, a Different Business Entirely
Directly across Sound Avenue from the Mattituck farm sits Patty's Berries & Bunches, which people frequently assume is part of Harbes because of the shared address block. It isn't. Patty's is its own operation, offering u-pick berries from June through October, and it doesn't share scheduling, ticketing, or ownership with the farm across the road. If you're planning a stop based on something you saw about Harbes hours, it won't tell you anything about whether Patty's is open that day.
This is the kind of mix-up that costs a family a wasted trip on a Saturday when Sound Avenue traffic is already backed up. Two businesses, one road, no relationship between their calendars.
Cutchogue Runs on a Slower, Stricter Clock
A few miles west on Route 25, Wickham's Fruit Farm in Cutchogue operates nothing like the Harbes properties. Wickham's traces its land back to 1661 and is now run by the 12th generation of the family that founded it, a lineage that predates most of what's built along this stretch of the North Fork today. A large share of that land sits in Suffolk County's Farmland Preservation program, meaning it stays agricultural for the long term rather than facing pressure to convert to other uses.
The farm stand keeps a tighter schedule than anything at Harbes: Monday through Saturday, 9am to 5pm, closed entirely on Sundays. Pick-your-own is even narrower, limited to Friday and Saturday, 10am to 3pm, and explicitly dependent on both weather and how much fruit is left on the vine that week. It's worth a call ahead before driving out expecting a full afternoon of picking.
What Wickham's grows also sets it apart. Laurie McBride, who works the farm, has noted that few stands in the area still grow and sell beach plums to the public, a native fruit the Wickham family grew up picking around local beaches. Apple picking there has historically extended into mid-October, adding another data point to the North Fork's uneven apple calendar: Riverhead's varieties rotate through the fall, Jamesport sticks to Honeycrisp alone, and Cutchogue's picking window closes earlier and depends more on that week's crop than any of the Harbes locations.
Planning Around the Actual Calendar
None of these four stops runs on the same clock, which is the point. A Saturday plan built around "let's go to Harbes" leaves out the question of which Harbes, and a plan built around "let's pick apples" rules out the Mattituck address entirely. The pumpkin patch's two-day grand opening on September 28 and 29 is a narrow window worth marking down if that's the specific event you want. Apple picking, by contrast, stretches out over weeks at Riverhead and Jamesport, with no single opening weekend to plan around, just varying fruit as the season moves along.
Sound Avenue and Route 25 carry a lot of fall traffic for a short stretch of road, and most of it is people who assumed one farm stand could cover everything on their list. It can't, not even within a single family's three properties. Knowing which address does what before you leave the driveway is the difference between a full afternoon and a wasted trip across town.
If you're the kind of person who tracks these details because you actually live here, or because you're weighing what year-round life on the North Fork looks like beyond the farm stands, The Principi Team spends its time in these towns for exactly that reason. Contact Us if there's a Mattituck or North Fork question, farm season or otherwise, we can help answer.
