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Community Corner

The Great Pumpkin is Just Up the Road

You don't have to drive to Petaluma to find a pumpkin patch when there's Grandma's a couple miles north of Healdsburg

Whether or not you believe in the “Great Pumpkin,” Charles Shulz’ imaginary holiday figure, your kids do – whether they know it or not. Just set a pre-schooler loose in a pumpkin patch and watch them go. There’s some kind of magic at work, that’s for sure.

Sonoma County is fortunate enough to be Pumpkin Country – the big orange squash grow to in our climate, and recreational pumpkin patches sprout up every fall to give families a place to play, pick out jack-o-lanterns and enjoy the fall weather.

The most notable is Petaluma’s Pumpkin Patch and Amazing Corn Maze, notable at least in part because of the recurrent traffic jams along Highway 101 South during its season. It offers four acres of autumnal fun, but it’s not the biggest: the Adobe Pumpkin Farm is fully six acres large, out where Washington Stree. dead-ends at Adobe Road.

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But you don’t need to go to Petaluma, and you don’t need to carry binoculars to keep an eye on your child. Head up Healdsburg Avenue past the Alexander Valley turn-off almost to the Lytton Springs Road, and you’ll find the friendly turf of .

Grandma is Jenny Crawford, an outgoing woman of 56 or thereabouts who loves children and shares her working ranch and farm with them every October. I met her at the , and she won me over with her promises of a kid-friendly place to take my granddaughter in search of the Great Pumpkin. 

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True to her word, when we visited last weekend it was all that the season promises, and more. We found country signage, a wide field of big orange squash, a hay bale pyramid, a tidy corn field to get lost in, a petting zoo, horses to ride, cages with Amazon parrots, even antique tractors ready for “a million imaginary miles,” as she says.

It’s free, though of course the pumpkins are for sale – priced by size and a certain amount of generous latitude among the staff, most of whom are Grandma’s kin. Also for sale are candy corn, country fresh eggs, bottled water and, if your timing is right and the barbecue going, maybe a hot dog. The petting zoo costs a bit, if your child wants to ride one of the ponies it costs a bit more.

Kids love this place, which means parents love it too. It’s small enough to look big to a 3-year-old but not so large they can get lost, and if the weather’s good they can easily spend an hour or two racing from one fun thing to the next, until they’re worn out.

And if there’s one thing parents love, it’s a place where kids wear themselves out.

Then you can take them home, with their prize pumpkin treasure, and get started on the next holiday activity - carving the jack'o'lantern.

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