Our Kind of Pumpkin Patch

We took advantage of the last hour of glorious sunlight on a beautiful Sunday afternoon and headed to our favorite pumpkin patch. With 12+ years of visiting pumpkin patches annually, we have had time to decide what brand of pumpkin patch is "ours." We've done the large agri-entertainment circuit - Belvedere Plantation in Fredericksburg, Cox Farms in Centreville. We've done the more home-grown but still a several-hour destination -- Snead's Farm in Fredericksburg, Cows n' Corn in Midland. We've done corn mazes like The Corn Maze in the Plains. We've even done a couple of trips to local farms that are no longer farms but have been transformed into housing developments now. In the end, we've decided our favorite is Owsberry Farm in Jeffersonton, right over the Culpeper County line.

It's really just a field with pumpkins and squash growing in it. And yet, there is something magical about that field. The kids spread out, a few looking for the perfect round pumpkin, but most looking for something different - a knobbly white squash; a long, curved crookneck; a bagful of stripy miniatures. When you've gathered your treasures, you get to weigh them - and if you guess the weight of your pumpkin, you get to pick something off of the "free" table. The kids love guessing the weight of each piece, comparing it to known quantities and deciding if its more or less, bickering with each other up or down a pound. We end up doubling our bounty with the freebies. "Entertainment" is a simple stacked pyramid of hay bales, and occasionally, a short hayride around the field. And that's it. There is no entrance fee and we come away with a renewed sense of happiness for not only the bounty of fall, but also for the bounty of this year of our lives.