Drive up Route 209 this Friday evening and you'll hear the flat, layered roar of modifieds and sportsman cars racing under the lights at Accord Speedway. Drive the same stretch of road this weekend and you'll find Saunderskill Farms opening its orchard gates for the first pick-your-own apples of the season. Neither event is unusual on its own. What's unusual is that they're landing in the same handful of days, because for most of the year, they don't.
That's the thing about Accord that a quick visit doesn't reveal. This isn't a town with one long, undifferentiated summer season that slowly fades into fall. It's a town that runs on two separate calendars, one set by a dirt track and one set by an orchard, and those calendars only overlap for about a week each year. That week starts now.
The track's clock is almost out
Accord Speedway opened its 2026 season with a practice run on April 24 and its first points race on May 1, a full card covering modifieds, sportsman, pure stocks, limited sportsman, slingshots, and four-cylinders. Since then it's been Friday nights, more or less straight through, with AMA motorcycle races slotted into select Saturdays in May, June, September, and October.
Here's the part that matters if you live here and think of the speedway as a background hum you can catch whenever: the season is closer to its end than its middle. The final points race lands on September 4, a week and a half from now. After that, the Friday night rhythm stops. It doesn't pick back up until the track's one true off-season event, the annual Gobbler race, on November 28.
So there are exactly two more Friday nights left in the points season, this Friday and the following one. Miss them and you're waiting until Thanksgiving weekend for the next race under the lights.
The orchard's clock is just starting
Saunderskill Farms runs on the opposite schedule, and it's about to switch on. Pick-your-own apples at the farm start the last weekend of August, which this year falls on the 29th and 30th, and the picking runs into mid-November. Ten varieties come ripe across that stretch, and the farm's pick-your-own tent handles bags and instructions for anyone stopping by.
This is a farm that's been doing this a long time. The Schoonmaker family has worked the land at 5100 Route 209 for eleven generations, and Saunderskill is one of the few farms in the country to receive the USDA's Tricentennial Award, a recognition reserved for farms that have stayed in the same family for three centuries. The market itself opens each year in early April with fresh produce and baked goods, but the fall identity, the apples, the free corn maze, the horse-drawn hayrides, doesn't start until this coming weekend.
Pumpkins are next, but not yet. Pick-your-own pumpkins don't open until the first weekend of October, more than a month out. The farm's mum display, over 4,000 plants grown on site, fills in through that gap. And if you're the type who marks the calendar by tractors instead of apples, the Annual Antique Tractor Pull happens on Columbus Day weekend, complete with tractor classes from 2,000 pounds up through an unlimited division, a stone boat, and a barbecue.
The overlap, mapped out
Line the two calendars up side by side and the pattern gets clearer than either business's own website makes it.
Date | Accord Speedway | Saunderskill Farms |
|---|---|---|
This Friday, Aug 28 | Friday night racing | Orchard not yet open for picking |
Aug 29 to 30 | Track quiet | Pick-your-own apples open for the season |
September 4 | Final points race of the season | Apple picking continues |
Early October | Track quiet | Pick-your-own pumpkins open, corn maze running |
Columbus Day weekend | Track quiet | Annual Antique Tractor Pull |
Mid-November | Track quiet | Apple season winds down |
November 28 | Annual Gobbler race | Farm's fall season largely over |
Read down that list and you'll see the two institutions almost never share a headline. The track's last Friday of the summer, August 28, comes one day before the orchard opens its trees. The farm's biggest fall event, the tractor pull, lands on a weekend when the speedway has already gone dark for the year. By the time the Gobbler race brings engines back to Route 209 in late November, the orchard's picking season is closing out.
The only point where both calendars are fully live at once is the six days between August 29, when the orchard opens, and September 4, when the speedway runs its last points race of the year.
Why the overlap is worth knowing
None of this is a coincidence exactly, but it isn't planned coordination either. A dirt track runs on a schedule built around long summer daylight and a points season that has to wrap before the weather turns. A working apple orchard runs on the schedule the fruit sets for itself. The two calendars were never going to line up for long, and the week where they do happens to be this one.
If you've lived in Accord for a while, you've probably experienced one side of this pattern without registering the other. Maybe you're a Friday night regular at the track and have never once noticed that the orchard down the road only opens its trees the same week your season starts winding down. Maybe you've been picking apples at Saunderskill for years without clocking that the roar you sometimes hear on your drive home is the speedway's last real push before its long autumn quiet.
That's the actual shape of an Accord year. It isn't one continuous season that blurs from warm to cool. It's two working businesses on two unrelated schedules that happen to cross paths for about a week in late summer, and the rest of the year they trade off, handing the town's Friday and Saturday nights back and forth between engine noise and orchard rows.
This weekend, that overlap begins. After September 4, you'll have the orchard to yourself until the tractor pull and the Gobbler race bring the rest of the calendar back around.
If you're weighing what it actually feels like to live somewhere like Accord, week to week and season to season, that's the kind of detail the property listings won't tell you. Fresh Air Realty works this stretch of Ulster County because we live in it, and we're always glad to talk through what a place is really like before you commit to it. Buy With Us. Sell With Us.
