Don't Judge a Pumpkin Patch by its Cover

It's a popular time of year for apple orchards, pumpkin patches, and hayrides. Some businesses combine all three, plus a few other attractions like corn mazes, and do very well. My wife and I took the kids to one such place last year.

We were in Alexandria, Minnesota this past weekend with our two boys and my three older kids from my first marriage. My wife wanted to take all the kids to an orchard/pumpkin patch again this year, and was concerned we wouldn't get a chance if we went to Alex (pronounced "Alec" by us Alex natives...one of those local things, like Lake Carlos being pronounced "Car'-luss").

So to Google I went and found a business just west of Alex that was an apple orchard, pumpkin patch, and hayride provider, just like you find in the Big City (Alex city limits population is around 10.000). Better yet, the online source said their hours were from 8am until dark through October. Jackpot!

We headed out Sunday morning with the directions I had written down, and like a Northwest Airlines pilot, I overshot the place by quite a bit before realizing it. How could we have missed it? It was right on this road!

My wife called the phone number I so smartly had also written down, and an old woman answers. Yes, they had apples/pumpkins/hayrides, but she and her husband just got back from church. They usually open around 1 PM (it was about 11 AM when we called), but if we turn around, look for the mailbox on the address, and pull in, they'll be glad to help us. Her husband would even change out of his Sunday clothes and fire up the John Deere to pull us on a hayride.

This big-city-style attraction was in fact just a lovely couple in there mid-eighties I would guess, who had been doing this for forty years, and it was all on their modest homestead. The woman pulled off the tarps to expose the pumpkins and apples, most of which were neither symmetrical or without some sort of flaws.

Her husband pulled out the tractor, an oil-burning machine that was barely bigger than an ATV. He hooked it up to a small wooden trailer/wagon equipped with home-made seats that wiggled when we sat on them. My two-year-old grabbed me tightly as I grabbed the semi-secure railing on our bumpy journey. "Daddy, I scared," he wimpered to me.

The exhaust we inhaled on the hayride (hay excluded, by the way) had to be about as damaging as if we had smoked two packs of filter-less Camels on the 10-minute trip. But the awkwardness of the whole situation at this Mom-and-Pop Orchard/Pumpkin Patch/Hayride Haven ended there.

To our surprise, their back yard was quite long, and consisted of 60 trees. The old man would stop occasionally, telling us of how this year's crop was poor, and why. A big reason was, not surprisingly, the weather, but we learned the weather affected the amount of bee pollination that occurred, which was not enough for a bumper crop. Who knew the Bee Movie was actually accurate to any degree?

We saw where the deer got into the pumpkins and squashes, and learned that barbed wire seems to work OK as a repellent. We saw all the trees, the raspberry patches, and other gardens. And at the end of the ride, we got to see how they make apple juice the old-fashioned way.

Out of the garage, they pulled out an old wood-and-steel contraption. It consisted of a motorized apple chopper, a barrel into which the apple chips flew, and a manual crank to squish the juice out. The juice would drain into a pale and they used a steel sieve to catch most of the pulp.

I had to take it on faith that the old machine, the bucket, sieve, and of course the apples had all been washed. The kids got a kick out of putting the apples in the chipper, although we kept a close eye on the two- and four-year-olds' fingers. No need to make apple juice a protein drink. After a sip of the best-tasting apple juice we'd ever had, we were sold.

We ended up with four pumpkins the kids picked out, a bag of apples, and a gallon of freshly squeezed organic apple juice, not to mention the hay-less hayride. All in little over an hour. Total bill: $16. We handed the nice woman a $20 bill and told her to keep the change.

Bargain of the year, I figured, plus we were truly helping out the local economy. Maybe they can invest in some wagon seating reinforcement.