“I mostly grew up in Houston, Texas. My parents were from Granville, Ohio, but my dad got an oil and gas job and they moved to Houston with Amoc. We also got to do some international travel during his 28-year career: we spent three years living in Norway and that’s where I got into skiing, the mountains, and being outdoors. After being invaded during World War II, they’re all about taking care of themselves: fishing, climbing, being able to repel. We had a week in fifth grade where we went to stay in this cabin in a fjord and learn survival skills with our international school training, which was pretty cool.
Then we went back to Houston to finish junior high and high school. After high school, I went to Colorado School of Mines and got a degree in Petroleum Engineering for the job security. I got a job right out of school at Noble Energy. I went to the Texas Panhandle for a hands-on oil field job, then rotated back to Denver and that’s where I met Katie.”
– Dan Burch, Hidden Hills Orchard
“I actually have kind of a similar background—I was born and raised in Houston. My dad is also in the oil and gas industry and we traveled internationally for that as well: Australia, Malaysia, Thailand. I went to Texas A&M University and got a Petroleum Engineering degree and then hired on with Noble Energy right out of college. It was the same kind of three-year rotation where I did my first rotation in Denver and that’s where I met Dan.
We met on my very first day at work. The whole team went out to lunch and on the way home from lunch, he’s driving me back and I asked him, ‘So where do your parents live?’ He said that they were in the process of moving from Houston to Marietta, Ohio, because they bought an apple orchard, which I thought was really cool.
It took Dan a month to finally ask me out on a date, and the rest is history.
Then Noble Energy decided to open an office in Pittsburgh. A new office has the same energy as a startup, and both Dan and I were at a point where we had to do something different. Dan Googled it and saw that Pittsburgh was only two hours away from his parents’ orchard and an hour and a half from skiing.
So, we moved to Pittsburgh, and that’s when we fell in love with the orchard.”
– Katie Burch, Hidden Hills Orchard
“This property has been a farm for a very long time–since the late 1800s—but they planted the first trees in 1998. The previous owner was a physics professor at Marietta College and his wife was a nurse. They put it up for sale as a turnkey business and it stayed on the market long enough for my dad to happen to come across it. They like the idea of being near family in Granville, because my mom has a lot of brothers and sisters there.
We wanted a lifestyle centered around getting to be together as a family, and the orchard seemed like a way to do that.
We were working our jobs in Pittsburgh and would come over once a month to help out, more often during the busy season. We loved the idea of working for yourself and with the land. When we would come over for a weekend project, we knew the work we were doing would have a direct improvement for the apples and for the business. We could see the fruits of our labor. It was something we were all working towards together.
As much as we love the people we’d met in the oil and gas industry, when it came down to it, it still always felt like a job. We had to wake up in the morning and work all day waiting to get back home. We wanted a lifestyle centered around getting to be together as a family, and the orchard seemed like a way to do that.
But then we were told that our positions were moving back to Houston—take it or leave it. At that point, the orchard didn’t make enough for two families and we weren’t ready to leave our jobs, so we moved back to Houston and then up to Denver to work for a private company.
We had our first kid…and then COVID hit. Dan was at home and working remotely, and we had our little family in our own little pocket of the world. We got a glimpse of what life would be like at the orchard. There might be a beautiful day and we could go to the park between meetings. Or we might go outside and have a picnic for lunch with our little family instead of in a break room at the office.
We decided that was the life that we wanted.
So, in March of 2021, we came out here for a month-long vacation, built a house, had another baby, and never left.”
– Dan and Katie Burch, Hidden Hills Orchard
“Hidden Hills Orchard is off of Route 26, right on a curve and then it’s all hills. You drive up and there is a beautiful old farmhouse that Dan’s parents live in. Then there is the big packing house which is where we’re open for U-Pick in the fall. We’re open on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for people to drive in, see the place, and hopefully pick their own on good harvest years.
Running a good orchard takes knowing the timing of things. If you skip pruning, you’ll pay for it for years after.
Since we’ve been here, we’ve added two more people to help out with the orchard. So, we’ve been able to expand a little and we regularly go down to the farmers market in Marietta, which is a really nice and thriving farmers market. Katie was even awarded Marietta’s Community Builder of the Year for her work with the farmers market.
Running a good orchard takes knowing the timing of things. If you skip pruning, you’ll pay for it for years after, so it’s important to get all 5,500 trees pruned every year and not get behind on. Right after pruning is done, you’ve got to do your protection sprays. It’s a hot, humid climate down here in Southeast Ohio and we’ve got fungus so we spray to protect the tree’s health. We’re about to plant 324 trees, which is the most we’ve ever done.
The orchard has always made award-winning sweet cider, but the hard cider idea happened in 2012, when we made our first batch of hard cider at home as a hobby. We had made too much cider late in the season because we didn’t know how much to make. There was all this extra cider that we were going to have to pour out because it doesn’t keep well.
That’s when we realized, ‘There’s a business here.’ The more we talked to people, they were like, ‘What are you waiting on? Do it!’ because hard cider was really starting to get popular.
We’ve got a friend who is an architect who drew up some awesome plans for us. So, now we’re working on getting builders to get a quote. We hope to not interrupt the orchard business at all, so we’ll build in November once the season is done. We’re just trying to just make sure we have all our ducks in a row. Then we need a federal license and all the state licenses to be able to produce and sell alcohol.
We’ve hired a cider consultant who’s won some gold medals for the cider he makes in Granville. We have a friend who is an architect draw up some wonderful plans, and we’re planning on building the expansion for hard cider sometime after the fall of this year.”
– Dan and Katie Burch, Hidden Hills Orchard
“We’ve had the privilege of living in different places, all across the world. One thing that Dan and I talk about is what makes us love the places we love. What is it that does or doesn’t make it feel like home?
In a great downtown, you can walk to where you want to go—a brewery, an ice cream shop, a restaurant, or wherever. You can do all of that in Marietta.
One thing for me has always been the realization that you don’t have to have a big city to have a really nice downtown feel. In a great downtown, you can walk to where you want to go—a brewery, an ice cream shop, a restaurant, or wherever. You can do all of that in Marietta. There’s a river that is gorgeous with a bike lane right along it. You can walk up and down the streets and it makes for a great date night or a nice Saturday morning to grab coffee. Small town life can be great in a small town with a downtown like Marietta’s.
Here in Southeast Ohio, we can experience all the benefits of a city with a great downtown and then five miles away, we get to live on a 100-acre farm. We get the best of both worlds.
Our daughter goes to preschool now, so I drive into Marietta every day. I love going over the bridge and I’ll purposely take the long way home to drive through downtown and think, ‘We get to live here.’”
– Dan and Katie Burch, Hidden Hills Orchard
#WeAreOhioSE
