A Trip to Fall : Many Seek Out Pumpkin Patches to Recall Season’s Spirit

When Anna Ravelo was growing up on her grandparents’ farm in the rural Colorado city of Monte Vista, there was no mistaking the coming of fall. It would ride in on the edge of the wind and make the leaves flutter on the trees.

But during this first week of October, Ravelo had to go hunting for fall in Orange County.

She found it.

“It’s nice for me to stand here in the hay. It makes me feel a little like I’m back home,” said Ravelo, watching her two young children romp around the field of electric-orange pumpkins on the northern outskirts of Irvine.

But this is no mere patch of rotund squash that Ravelo stumbled across. It is part harvest festival, part amusement park.

Like many Orange County entrepreneurs during the fall festivities, the owners of Johnson Brothers Pumpkin Patch have pulled out all the stops. At shopping centers and roadside stops, Halloween is more than a child’s delight--it’s big business. And it’s growing bigger all the time.

“We sell corn stalks, hay bales, gourdes, mini-pumpkins, Indian corn, a bunch of pumpkin carving kits, little toys for kids--just a bunch of Halloween things,” said Dave Clarke, who helps run the Johnson Brothers patch, one of three owned by the company in Orange County.

Ravelo wasn’t quite ready to purchase a pumpkin yet. But her 4-year-old son Christopher and 6-year-old daughter Lia had fun feeding the farm animals, bouncing around on a few coin-operated kiddie rides, and strolling through the mock graveyard, past the “Tomb of the Unknown Pumpkin” and other seasonally themed headstones.

The pumpkins are shipped from farms in Northern California and Oregon via refrigerated trucks to the Johnson Brothers lots. Orange County has only a few scattered pumpkin fields.

“They’re not on our list of major crops,” said John Ellis, deputy agricultural commissioner for the county. “They’re grown here mostly for roadside stands and local farmers markets.”

Nursery plants and strawberries are the county’s top two crops, Ellis said.

In Santa Ana on Thursday, workers were setting up pony-ride equipment for Pumpkin City’s Pumpkin Farm, one of five locations owned and operated by Bill Derentz. He’s been in the pumpkin, Christmas tree and strawberry-selling business for the last 19 years.

“Basically, we sell pumpkins,” he said, “but what we really sell is entertainment. We’ve brought in country-western bands, costume character shows on a stage; we’ve brought in the animals and the petting zoos. A lot of people have copied what we do.”

Some shopping centers are eager to lease a corner of their parking lots for a pumpkin patch, Derentz said. “It pulls people into the shopping centers.” Near the Laguna Hills Mall, his pumpkin business is on an acre of land, complete with elephant rides.

“Halloween has become bigger every year,” Derentz said. “Even in the retail end of the business you can see that the stores are carrying a lot more merchandise than they used to.”

Wholesale pumpkin prices are up this year from 8% to 10%, said Derentz, who gets most of his stock from central California. Prices have been slowly climbing for the last four years, he said.

Retail prices at most lots range from $1 to $15. But some 150-pound hybrid varieties can sell for $80 or more.

The most visible sign of the fall season in Southern California--rain--is not welcomed by those who sell pumpkins.

“Rain is the one thing that will kill a pumpkin lot,” Derentz said. “Rain is our worst enemy. It keeps the people away and it can ruin the pumpkins.”

But rain was the last concern of Fountain Valley resident Jean Stearns and her two children as they wandered through the straw of a Huntington Beach pumpkin lot near Golden West College. Her visit to the newly opened lot on Thursday marked the beginning of a month-long quest.

“We celebrate the whole month,” Stearns said. “We go to every pumpkin patch we can find. It’s something to do.”