GREENVILLE, Mich. — Klackle Orchards is Klackles no more after an auction split up the land and handed the keys over to new owners.
While the 500-acre apple orchard is now just 75 acres, the new owners say they’re offering the same orchard experience under a new name: Frugthaven Farm.
"Frugthaven — everybody in town is practicing how to say it right now. But, if you look up the Danish word for fruit it's ‘frugt’ and then if you add ‘haven’ it's garden so we put it together and made it Frugthaven Farm," said co-owner April Petersen.
Frugthaven is not quite like the old Klackle Orchards.
"It's gonna be much more simplified we're kind of calling it a boutique orchard now," Petersen said.
Greenville natives April Petersen and her husband Michael bought a piece of the farm to keep the community’s orchard tradition alive.
"This is a part of Greenville and it's something that the whole town is passionate about and we just did not want to see it get lost in the shuffle of the Klackles retiring," Petersen says.
But they know there are some big shoes to fill.
"The Klackles farmed here for years and years and years and they had their own special thing going here and we could not try to duplicate that at all," says Petersen.
They're scaling things down. The carousel and petting zoo won’t be there, but the Petersens are keeping what's important: the apples.
Forty acres of apples and 20 acres of pumpkins will fill up the space, and the market will be back, offering coffee, hard cider and a community favorite: Klackle doughnuts.
"If you can envision like a lawn out back where we'll have some food trucks and you can sit in the lawn with maybe a life size Jenga and hang out with friends and spend the day, take a wagon ride through the property, concerts on the lawn in the future," says Petersen.
Frugthaven Farm opens Aug. 15 and will stay open for the season until Halloween. The Petersens hope to host events like weddings, parties and concerts at Frugthaven in the future.
