LaFayette (WSYR-TV) -- The LaFayette Apple Festival is this weekend and local vendors are hard at work preparing our favorite apple dishes for the occasion.
But with the spring’s late frost and the summer drought, apple prices have soared, which is why you may be dishing out a little extra this year for homemade apple pies and sauce.
Columbian Presbyterian Church member Eva Palmer has been working on the apple sauce for days. She's making enough sauce to serve with 1,700 chicken dinners to be sold at the festival.
Between the sauce and the apple pies, church volunteers are using 80 bushels of local apples.
They have 13 freezers filled with 1,000 pies and each pie will be a little bit more expensive this year.
“We had to pay $22 a bushel for apples this year. Last year I think we paid $10 or $11,” Palmer explained.
The pies will now cost $12 dollars – a $2 increase in order to raise enough money at the festival to help sustain the church for a year.
“A lot of it for up keep and insurance and whatever expenses the church has,” Palmer said.
And though, she says, they have a lot of fun making the pies, they still want to make a profit, too.
Their goal is to match the $12,000 raised last year and they’re optimistic because it’s hard to resist the homemade taste.
