Hitting the Patch

Ahhh... We have lived here for seven years and now hit at least one (if not more!) local farm a year - for pumpkins, apple picking, berry picking, peach picking... you get the idea! The last couple of years I have tried to hit a farm with a corn maze. Now that the boys are older, I don't have to coax them through it and can let them run a little more safely. So here are the farms we've visited, and our thoughts on them. I am not including pricing because prices change, of course, but I will include web links!

Clark's Elioak Farm

This is one of the more popular farms in the Columbia area - and so frequently crowded. Clark's is located off of Rte. 108. We've been there for pumpkins, Christmas trees, hay rides, and games. We also went with friends one year for a birthday party.

The hayride is one of the better ones we've been on. They take you on a trail through the woods and along the trail are old faces salvaged (saved) from Enchanted Forest over on Rte. 40. Enchanted Forest is closed now, but the dragons and other characters are being preserved by Clark's for all to enjoy. As you ride along, sitting on the hay bales, you hear shouts of joy and surprise as new faces are spotted. The ride ends at the pumpkin patch where you disembark to pick your gourd.

Clark's also features animals to feed, a horse ride and a haybale-type city for the smaller children. There is not as much to do for the oldest children, but all do enjoy the hay ride and it is not too big for the youngest, who might tire out more easily.

Larriland Farm

Larriland is also one of the better-known farms in the area and frequently very busy, especially on the weekends. The best time to go? When there is a light drizzle - then you practically get the place to yourself (better bring a jacket though!) Larriland is open most of the year and has multiple fields that they rotate through, depending on the crops and the season. It is a good idea to check the website before going so you can see what is ripe and ready. We have picked apples, peaches, blackberries, spinach, and pumpkins there ourselves.

Standard Fall/Hallowe'en things at Larriland include apple fritters and cider, a hay ride, pumpkin picking, a small hay maze for the youngest kids, and a haunted house. Their hay ride is also pretty good and winds along around parts of the farm and a small lake on the property. Along the way are signs to read, ghosts hanging from the trees and riddles to solve. All of these enhance the ride as you keep an eye out for what's next.

The haunted house is short but the kids enjoy going through multiple times and you do hear occasional shouts and screams coming from within! I usually have a small child with me so have not gone with my olders so have not seen the inside. The hay maze is where the kids tend to go... and stay. The walls are tall enough that the kids cannot see over so for them it is great fun as they usually get a game of hide and seek going or something along those lines. The older kids get bored a little more quickly but enjoy it all the same.

North Run Farm

This is where we went this year. As it seems to be with most "corn maze farms", the biggest draw for North Run is the corn maze. I'll get to that in a second. North Run features two corn mazes - 0.4 miles and 2 miles - and you solve a mystery while inside. They also have a hay ride, pumpkins, animals and a couple of "hay structures" for the children to run on, around, and through.

The hay ride is ... "eh." It goes in a simple squared-off circle around a smaller corn field and then you get off. It's too short to be exciting, you don't really sit on the hay unless you sit in the middle (benches line the two sides) and except for the youngest riders, it's just kind of dull.

Some of the pumpkins here had HUGE vines attached. Wowee! They had "regular" pumpkins, white, purple, and all the various gourds you would normally see at a fall farm scene. They also had a selection of apples that were very tasty but not too many of those. There was a mini-hay maze for the very youngest kids, with short walls that made it suitable for even our 22 mo. old Buttercup to go through and walk on. In another section, they had half-tires set up into the ground for the kids to climb around on. They had a corn teepee the kids could go into (and back out of) and then "Hayland" for the biggest kids to climb and jump around on.

As I said though, their big draw is the corn maze and the North Run folks put the bulk of their effort into that. To the left (this year) is the 0.4 mile maze. As you go through the maze, sound is muted, breezes are largely blocked off an you enter a kind of creepy little world! You take a maze guide in with you that shows the path and where certain clues are located. There are additional unmarked clues scattered throughout as well. The remainder of the clues are located in the 2-mile maze. They do a different shape each year and this year the maze is in the shape of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. I do believe we hit every tooth! We had a good time looking for the clues, but being with the youngest child in our group (22 months), did not finish. Two other groups that we were with did finish though, including the group with the five year old. The teens petered out before the fivers

- go figure!

Those are the three that we've been to most often or most recently. I hope they are helpful to some!

Fall, Pumpkins, and Life's Lessons!

I love this time of year! Getting to walk down the street, dry leaves crunching under my feet on the sidewalk, always reminds me of when I was younger- mostly around junior high age, I suppose, when I walked everywhere. Ahhh... those were the days. I remember being 12 or 13, somewhere in there, and using tin foil to put braces on my Hallowe'en pumpkin with a friend.

And those were times of high anxiety too - but for reasons I now look on as being ... well, stupid. I don't say that to belittle what we - and now our children - go through at that sensitive age range, but what my peers think of me and my decisions matters far less than what my true friends think of me. Those friends who love me and have proven their love and respect for me by being honest even when it hurt my feelings and being available even when they didn't particularly want to be helping (babysitting, anyone?) and just being there in general to celebrate our lives together. I now know that for every hobby we enjoy, someone else does too. I recognize that we all feel "alone" sometimes, but rarely are in reality. And am trying to guide my almost-11 year old Maestro through the rough waters he's already entering, before he is fully immersed in (and swallowed up by?) the stormy sea of adolescence.

In the meantime, I'm building as many good memories as I can, hoping to give him an anchor to family and an example of what true friendship is. So we went this past Saturday to a new pumpkin farm with some friends - North Run Farm. We went with two other homeschooling families, of whom I think very highly. One family has four children and the other three, many around the same age as my own older boys. They are all very well behaved and pleasant to talk to, in spite of being "unsocialized" by the local school systems, but socialized within our groups and our family environments (that's my nod to homeschooling here... perhaps I'm a bit biased though.) One other person came along - a friend who is single and whom Jeff and I have known, worked with, disagreed with (on occasion), shared fellowship with... in short, a true friend, Beth. You've seen her blog mentioned on here before, but she's such a great friend, I'll link to it again - you can see her knitting accomplishments here.

Beth is not a big crowd fan. She likes quiet, animals, knitting, long walks, etc. But she is a great friend and so she gamely comes over on Saturday nights to have dinner and be with our family and a few other friends. This weekend, she joined us for our pumpkin patch and excursion through the corn maze. She took pictures of Buttercup as she ran ahead for a bit before getting screechy-tired (and driving us all crazy!) and the boys while they ran and played. Beth is awesome. Everyone should have a Beth like ours (but you can't have ours... :) The picture at left is our Beth - not from the farm, but from her birthday, but it is a picture of which I am enormously fond!

The corn maze was fun but gave us all fits! We started out at the 0.4 mile maze. Throughout the

maze were stops where "clues" were located to try to solve a mystery. There was no gain to solving it, simply fun in making the effort. We found clues 1 - 4 on the smaller maze and then proceeded to the larger. Maestro and Smeagol went with the older boys while Bruiser went with the other two mothers and the younger boys - we got Buttercup, trust me when I say that she was plenty by herself and I am totally grateful to my friends who were willing to let the boys go through with them.

Beth, Jeff and I made it through about ten minutes or so of the 2 mile maze before deciding just to focus on finding the way out! The funny thing about a corn maze is that even when the temperature is very pleasantly in the low 70s, inside a corn maze is a bit of a hotbox because the corn prevents most breezes from going through and so you bake, where you would otherwise be quite comfortable. Buttercup began to complain no matter what we tried to do, "Do you want down?" "NO!"

"Do you want your shoes off?" "NO!"

"Do you want a drink?" "NO!"

(Then Beth asked, "Do you want to be good?" ... no answer!)

We found our way out - and then called Maestro on the cell phone I had given him (my own, he doesn't have one for himself as yet) to see where they were at. I get a grumpy answer, "Hello."

Such a down-in-the-mouth tone was hardly what I expected from him while he is with his friends, having freedom without the parents and supposedly enjoying being a big kid. His group had just exited the maze, but hadn't found all the clues. They had two left and he wanted to find them all. The group he was with outvoted him and decided to throw in the towel. For Maestro, this was a sign of "immaturity." One more stumbling block in getting older: realizing that sometimes you get outvoted and have to find the joy in being with friends - or take the difficult steps of going without the group - anyway.

So, not without some small protest, we moved on, and went to find pumpkins and the hayride. In the end, we all had a great time with true friends. I am grateful that Maestro got to see that regardless of our sometime-disagreements, they are not the end of the world, nor do they have to mean the end of the friendship. I hope the lesson stays with him, even as we continue our foray into the (homeschool) junior high years and in the meantime, I am still enjoying the times when he decides just to play!

Tomorrow - a review of the various pumpkin patches we've visited in the area over the last several years and what we like about them!