October Arrives; Pumpkin Patches Open For A Season Of Perfect Photos
Area farms are open through Halloween, and so is the 47-minute window families now need to pick one pumpkin.
WAUKESHA — Cozy Nook Farm is open daily from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. through October 31, with weekend hayrides running on the hour, and Basse's Taste of Country in nearby Colgate has its corn maze, pick-your-own patch, farm animals, and wagon rides back in business for the month. Everyone involved will tell you the season is about tradition. Nobody involved will tell you the tradition is now a 77-minute production with a post-production phase.
That number comes from my own household, where my daughter and son-in-law spent 47 minutes this past weekend selecting and posing with a single pumpkin at Cozy Nook, followed by 30 minutes in the parking lot narrowing roughly 60 photos down to the three that would be "allowed" to exist publicly. The pumpkin itself was fine. Round. Orange. Did not audition poorly, as far as I could tell from the car.
The Four-Minute Pumpkin
"We probably looked at nine pumpkins before we picked the one," said Trisha Novachek, 34, a Waukesha mother of two who estimated her family's patch visit ran closer to an hour and ten minutes door to door. "Four of them had a flat side. Two were technically squash, I think. You don't know until you've turned it over three times." Novachek said the actual selection process took about four minutes once the finalist pumpkin was identified, with the remaining time going to "repositioning for light."
Cozy Nook Farm has not, to its credit, added a formal service around any of this, though staff have noticed the pattern. "We get families who've been here forty minutes and haven't left the first hay bale display," said Deacon Holtz, who works the farm's photo-friendly displays most weekends and has taken to describing himself, only partly as a joke, as the patch's unofficial photography concierge. "I've started pointing people toward the better light around 4 p.m. It's not my job. It's become my job.
The Edit Cycle
The second phase, less discussed but arguably longer, happens after the farm visit: the editing. Novachek said her family's process involves a group text where four photos get sent to a sibling in Pewaukee for a ranking, followed by a second round of cropping once a winner is chosen. "We don't post the real one," she said. "We post the one where nobody's eyes are closed and the pumpkin looks like it was heavier than it was."
"People think they're buying a pumpkin. They're really renting forty-five minutes of a nice background."
— Deacon Holtz, Cozy Nook Farm staff
Basse's Taste of Country, about 20 minutes northwest in Colgate, draws a similar crowd for its corn maze and wagon rides, though a farm spokesperson said the photo bottleneck there tends to happen at the hay bale pyramid near the entrance rather than in the patch itself. "The maze moves people along pretty well, because you kind of have to keep walking," said Holly Ferber, a seasonal attraction coordinator at the farm. "The patch is where people stop and really commit to getting the shot.
A Festival To Match The Pace
The county's pumpkin calendar peaks October 24 with the Annual Fall Harvest Festival on Wisconsin Avenue, which draws families from across the county for seasonal activities and local farm products and will, if recent Octobers are any guide, produce several thousand additional photographs of pumpkins, children holding pumpkins, and dogs sitting unconvincingly next to pumpkins they want no part of.
None of this is a complaint, exactly. I have three photos from my own daughter's visit saved to my phone, and I will admit the pumpkin looks terrific in all of them, round and orange and entirely unaware of the 47 minutes it cost. If the farms wanted to speed the line along, they could. But a pumpkin patch that moved people through quickly wouldn't really be a pumpkin patch. It would just be produce.