I’ve wanted to have a pumpkin patch before we even lived on a farm.
Sometime in 2012 or 2013 we visited a big pumpkin patch in the Niagara region one thanksgiving weekend, and the idea lodged in my head. How cool would it be to grow pumpkins and invite people in. Watch families make memories and help facilitate that.
The idea has always been there, but life has always taken us in different directions.
Until this spring.
When we were planning out the upick (which totally drowned and has to be moved and pushed back at least a year - but that’s another story) we ended up with a small triangle between what was to be the parking lot, and the shaded area underneath our walnut trees. It became a question what we were going to do with it. Initially I thought more berries, but the juglone from the walnuts would hinder their growth too much to make it worth it.
Almost as if I was nudged, I suddenly asked Jack if pumpkins were susceptible to juglone. And it turns out, they are not!
Instantly my little dream grew legs. Jack pointed out that because we didn’t have any pumpkin seeds, let alone enough for this whole area, we’d miss the planting window. He’d forgotten that every year for at least four years I had been ordering several varieties of pumpkins for essentially no reason, so not only did we have enough for the patch, we had a selection!
At least seven packets of pumpkin seeds went in the ground. As did a ton of spent bedding from our barn. And then hours and hours of picking off beetles, and spraying and dusting them with a homemade tansy bug spray and DE. Over the whole season we only lost a few plants to bugs.
Then the deer found the patch and I really thought we’d had it then. But they only nibbled two pumpkins before we got our faux electric fence up (video on that on YouTube!) and after that, I don’t think we lost a single one after that.
Last week they were beginning to be ready. We were so busy with turkeys I was scared we weren’t going to get to actually opening. But our schedules cleared, the weather cooperated, and super last minute we opened to our friends on Saturday.
I was blown away by the response. Besides the fact that we made enough to cover easily half of my order for seeds for next year (16 varieties but who’s counting) watching the kids carve pumpkins right there where they picked them, and smile and laugh and have a great time…ugh. It was amazing. It was ten times the feeling I thought it would be ten or eleven years ago when this idea first nestled itself in my brain.
So to our friends who came out for our soft open - thank you so much. You gave me the confidence to open to the public, for real, which we did yesterday. And wow. That was incredible. I love this community so much. Having so many complete strangers pull up somewhere they’ve never been before, without even a sign, to come support my dream and go home with pumpkins that we grew right here in Rusagonis 🥹 it would have been hard to not get emotional about it right then and there, if we hadn’t been so busy!
To the friends and community who supported us in this - thank you. We’ll be back with more pumpkins, more variety, more animals, and more activities next year. The feedback I got has absolutely solidified this for me. And even Jack is on board now, beyond just supporting his wife haha. In his words, I’m a dork about pumpkins, but it turns out I’m not the only one! 😉
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