The Community Table · Presented by The Churchville Inn

Tabora Farms: A Bike Ride, an Orchard Kid, and a Market That Keeps Growing

How a kindergarten teacher and a farmer’s son traded Long Island for a Chalfont orchard, and built one of the warmest stops in Bucks County.

Tabora Farms began, in a roundabout way, with a hundred-mile bike ride. In 2003 Patricia Torrice was teaching kindergarten on Long Island, and Caleb had just come down from upstate New York to open a farm market there; the two met on that ride and were married a year and a half later. Caleb had grown up on a two-hundred-acre fruit orchard and gone on to study agriculture at Cornell, and Patricia had always loved to cook and bake, so when the question of what they might build together finally came up, the answer was already sitting on the kitchen table. It came up on a quiet January night in 2008, at Caleb’s family farm in Oswego, New York, when they decided to get back to the country, somewhere their children could come to know a farm firsthand. The search led them to Tabora, and by their own account they never looked back.

Patricia left the classroom, a bittersweet goodbye, and in the years since the family has welcomed two more children while the farm has kept changing around them. Walk into the market today and the morning’s baking meets you first, then the deli counter with its soups, sandwiches, quiches, and entrées. Further in, the country store holds locally roasted coffee, homemade preserves, salsas, chocolates, and a machine for grinding your own peanut butter, along with a long shelf of Tabora’s Flavor Explosion pretzels in varieties that wander from dill pickle and French onion to snickerdoodle and lemon cheesecake. Outside, the fields and orchards open for picking as the seasons turn: blueberries, cherries, peaches, plums, sunflowers in August, apples, and pumpkins in October.

This autumn carries a particular story. An April freeze left most markets in the region short on apples this year, but Tabora Farms is well stocked from the family’s own farm on Lake Ontario, and their annual Apple Sale returns the first weekend in October. Apple picking runs on weekends through the season, pumpkins arrive in October, and the market itself keeps its doors open every day of the week. The farm keeps its exact picking schedule current, so it is worth a quick look before you head out.

Patricia describes Tabora as a place of constant growth, and that is exactly why we are pointing you toward it. We have kept our own doors open in Bucks County for more than forty years, long enough to know that a place gets better when a family puts itself into it, season after season, and the neighbors take notice. Spend a Saturday morning in the orchard, carry the apples and the pretzels back to the car, and when the light begins to turn gold, come sit with us for dinner. That is a good Bucks County autumn day, start to finish.

Part of The Community Table series · The Churchville Inn