Pumpkin Patch (Sort of )

Pumpkin patches here in Colorado are on farms. There are no cute corner lots. No games. No trains to ride. No pumpkins sitting nicely on straw bales. No fresh produce in the little stand on the way out. Nothing like the one that we use to visit yearly back in California. Here you go out the farm and walk the rows and rows of pumpkins, most still attached to the vines, trying to find one that suits you. It's an arduous, cold, and sometimes very dirty process, depending on what the weather has been like recently. Two years ago I went with Brandon's preschool to the pumpkin patch. We drove over 20 miles to go to a farm up outside of Longmont. The kids loved the tractor ride out to the pumpkin patch. And all the mud from the rain storm the day before. I did laundry right after we got home.

Brian and I decided to take the kids to a local pumpkin patch today. A "You Pick 'Em" patch - which we were unaware of until the woman at the entrance handed us a little pumpkin saw to detach our prizes from the vine. We drove out onto the farm, parked, and proceeded to inspect our pumpkins. The colder temps we've had, along with snow and freezing temperatures we experienced the first week of October have not been friendly to the local pumpkin crop. Most of the pumpkins were either rotting, or had some serious soft spots. It was a project and a half trying to find a decent one. It turned our pumpkin patch adventure from one where were just looking for a nice pumpkin to a serious search where were had to find pumpkins that not only looked and felt good (ie: no soft spots), and that we thought might last until Friday night's pumpkin carving party (Caitlin got a little pumpkin during her field trip last week that has already been relegated to the garbage pail due to rotting). Combine that with a cold front blowing in and attempting not to trip over the tangled mass of pumpkin vines, and you had quite a different outing than what I've experienced in California at the Spina Farms patch, or Half Moon Bay. I can see the value of both, but city patches (the fake ones, as people here tell me) are a lot easier. And cleaner.


All in all, we did manage to find two pumpkins that will work, provided they don't rot before Friday. I'm keeping them in the house, though, since we are expected to get snow tomorrow and more freezing temperatures overnight and next week. I bought one at Sunflower Farmer's Market last week. That's our "just in case" pumpkin. Just in case the other two don't make it. The kids seemed to have fun (except when they got caught in the sticker patches, or tripped on vines). Brian inspected about 200 pumpkins, no exaggeration, and I played photographer. Mothers must get the quintessential cute-kids-at-the-pumpkin-patch pictures, you know. Just ignore all the dirt in ours. And the storm rolling in!

For more pictures, click here.