Across County, the Gourd Times Roll

Here in sunny Ventura County there are few reminders, other than the calendar, that another summer has gone and a new fall begun.

Unless of course you are familiar with the Faulkner Farm pumpkin patch in Santa Paula, where a festive tradition of botanical globes spangled in fiery harvest colors christens the autumnal season.

The 24th annual and perhaps last Harvest Festival and Pumpkin Patch kicked off Saturday as hundreds of people from across Southern California made their way to these chocolate-brown fields to celebrate autumn in an old-fashioned, country kind of way.

“There’s no place that goes to this extent,” said Terri Mayhugh, a five-year pumpkin patch veteran who made the 120-mile trip with her family from Laguna Hills. “It’s so much better than a parking lot with piles of pumpkins.”

Even so, pumpkin patches, real or not, are sprouting up in places such as the auto mall in Thousand Oaks, along the Ventura Freeway and in the parking lots of grocery stores as the playful season of jack-o’-lanterns and pumpkin pie quickly approaches.

While Southern Californians have become used to the parking lot imitations, the Faulkner Farm pumpkin patch is the real thing and full of enough rural charm to put a smile on the face of even the most jaded urbanite.

The Harvest Festival and Pumpkin Patch, which will be open from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. every day until Oct. 30, got a practical start 23 years ago when Allen and Lin Ayers decided to grow pumpkins between the rows of their lemon trees to put the soil to use.

After harvest, they set up a small, ramshackle stand covered with dried cornstalks and next to a hand-painted sign to sell the pumpkins to passing motorists.

As the years went by, the pumpkin stand grew to become a Ventura County landmark.

There, amid the twangy rhythms of country bands and the sweet scent of straw, hundreds of people picked through fields littered with the bulbous orange boulders in search of their own Great Pumpkin.

“We didn’t want one that was too big, but we didn’t want a puny one, either,” said Camarillo resident Monica Kusick, inspecting pumpkins with her 9-year-old daughter Colleen. “And this place has all sorts.”

They finally decided on a “medium”-sized pumpkin--medium being relative to the other elephantine pumpkins in the “Big Max” field--and after a few false starts and couple of drops, hoisted it in their wheelbarrow.

“It’s a lot heavier than it looks,” Kusick said.

This may be the last year of the Harvest Festival, as new owners from the Ventura County office of the University of California Cooperative Extension take over the farm for development of an educational center.

But owner Lin Ayers, who said she and her husband sold the property to concentrate on teaching, said she expects something similar to continue.

“We’ve left it in good hands,” she said. “I’m sure it’ll still be here next year in some form or another.”

But even if the festival doesn’t get a new start under different owners, county residents needn’t worry that they will be left pumpkinless.

There are still plenty of them in cities across the area.

Jimmy Erhardt, a 29-year-old pumpkin grower, runs the Holiday Farms in Simi Valley and for the past 13 years has set up his patch at the corner of Olsen Road and Los Angeles Avenue.

While Erhardt has all the essentials of a successful pumpkin patch--bales of hay, straw and most important, plenty of pumpkins--he also relies on something that few would ever associate with autumn: a 20-foot-high fiberglass tyrannosaur to lure in the customers.

“A lot of people just come to see that,” Erhardt said of his fanged commercial lure. “You really can’t miss it if you’re driving by.”

In addition to the glaring replica of the extinct carnivore, Erhardt also has what he calls “the biggest haunted house in the area,” plus hayrides and several special events to go on throughout the month.

Others, such as Arlene Leonard, who operates a pumpkin patch off the Ventura Freeway in Camarillo, have taken similar steps to make pumpkin buying more of an attraction.

In addition to thousands of pumpkins squatting in fields at Leonard’s patch, there are more than a dozen scarecrows, some dressed in tuxedos and top hats and others in dirty dungarees, inside a field of sunflowers.

“People just love it,” Leonard said. “Sometimes we get families who stay for two or three hours looking for a pumpkin or just relaxing in the fields.”