Stoecklin's Orchard

Stoecklin's Orchard Stoecklin's Orchard Stoecklin's orchard was started in 2001. It is owned and operated by Kay & Phil Stoecklin.

We are a young orchard, so please be patient while our plants grow to harvest size. During blueberry season, we are open for U-Pick on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays from 8AM until we are picked out. Directions: From Greenville, IL, go north on Rt. 127 to Sorento Ave. Turn EAST on Sorento Ave and go 2 miles to the SECOND crossroad called Ayers Rd. (DON'T take the first crossroad - it's called

West Ayers). Turn NORTH on AYERS RD and go approximately 1/2 mile. We are located in the taupe colored shed with the dark green roof and trim on the west side of Ayers Rd.. We will have signs up durring blueberry season at the corner of Ayers and Sorento directing you to our farm and orchard.

08/23/2026
Yay!
07/24/2026

Yay!

This is exciting...
07/20/2026

This is exciting...

Drive through the Appalachians and you will see gravestones. They are stumps. Four billion of them. The American chestnut was the king of the eastern forest. It dominated the mountains. Produced mast crops that fed passenger pigeons by the billion. Supplied rot-resistant timber that built barns still standing today. Then an Asian fungus arrived in the early 1900s. Cryphonectria parasitica. Chestnut blight. It spread at roughly fifty miles per year. By 1950, the functional chestnut forest was gone.
The stumps still try. They send up shoots every year. The shoots grow twenty feet. Then the blight finds them. They die back. The cycle repeats. For generations.
The American Chestnut Foundation just planted blight-resistant American chestnuts across more than twenty U.S. states. These are not hybrids that mostly look like chestnut. They are American chestnuts with a wheat gene inserted to defeat the blight, or backcrossed varieties with minimal Chinese parentage, depending on the program line. After a century of effort. Decades of crossing, testing, failing, and crossing again. The king of the eastern forest is coming home.
The plantings are small now. Experimental orchards and restoration sites. But they are alive. Reproducing. Surviving blight infection without dying. The ecological hole left by the chestnut has persisted for generations. Nothing else produces the same volume of food at the same time of year. If these plantings scale, the wildlife that depended on chestnut mast might finally get it back. It took one hundred years. But the tree that built the eastern forest is not extinct yet.

Between the weather and the critters and low berry count, we have decided to shut down our Blueberry fields this year. ...
07/04/2026

Between the weather and the critters and low berry count,
we have decided to shut down our Blueberry fields this year.
It was a tough year. We hate it too.
Thank you everybody that came that first day. It was all smiles.

Kay & Phil

Closed again Tuesday 6/30.Fingers crossed for Saturday. 🤞🫐
06/30/2026

Closed again Tuesday 6/30.

Fingers crossed for Saturday. 🤞🫐

We will be closed again tomorrow, Saturday 6/27. Still no berries. Hoping the Elliotts will still come through. 🤞Kisse...
06/27/2026

We will be closed again tomorrow, Saturday 6/27.
Still no berries. Hoping the Elliotts will still come through. 🤞
Kisses from the berry field...

Address

1709 Ayers Road
Donnellson, IL
62019

Opening Hours

Tuesday 8am - 6pm
Thursday 8am - 6pm
Saturday 8am - 6pm

Telephone

+12175373801

Website

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