Last weekend our family was on a mission to find the perfect
pumpkin. The kids have been begging for one ever since the grocery store put
big bins of them in front of their store, but I didn't want to get
ours that way. I wanted to buy one from the source and pluck it from
the ground and give my suburban children the family farm experience
complete with corn mazes and fall colors and
photo ops.
We searched online -
http://www.pumpkinpatchesandmore.org/WApnw.php
- and the closest one we found was
Carpinito
Brothers Farm right off highway 167 in Kent, so we decided to
make that our Saturday excursion.
It was a popular site that day and we had to park in the far lot
but luckily we noticed plenty of wheel barrows available for hauling
your produce picks back to your car. We wandered through the pumpkin
patch pointing out the ones we thought were the best. There were so
many! We waited until the end to get one though because we didn't
want to have to lug it around with us while we were in the corn maze.
That's Mt. Rainier in the distance. Can you see it?
Carpinito Brothers Farm has TWO corn mazes - one "Huskies"
maze in the shape of a football and helmet and one "Cougars"
maze in the shape of, well, I couldn't figure out what it was but
someone told me it was a cougar face. Not being sports fans or
Washington natives, we had no allegiance to either school so we went
in both, and there were times when I feared we'd never find our way
out.
It's funny, the people your run into in a corn maze. Some follow
the map and know exactly where they're going, determined to make it
all the way through and gather hole punches in their card along the
way. Most though, are lost and wandering around wide-eyed and a wee
bit worried. It becomes a group effort to get through it with the
map-tracking determined ones helping the lost find their bearings. We
were, at times, both of these types and after nearly 3 and a half
miles of maze-wandering, the wide-open pumpkin patch was a welcoming
site.
Next, we headed to the produce stand where we picked out apples,
onions, Swiss chard, cabbage, and squash. Then, we each picked out a
decorative gourd - the ugliest, weirdest, wartiest ones we could
find, and I got some flowers for our front porch. Lastly, and after
some debate, we found our pumpkin - a great big 20-pounder, perfectly
plump with a stable base and smooth canvas for carving. We got
everything weighed, paid, and hauled a wheel barrow back to the car
brimming with our autumn bounty.
