A Day Out at Hatter’s Farm

In the continued spirit of October, we made our way to Hatter’s Farm, an activity-clad farm which we’d occasionally spotted signs for while heading to the next city over. It had been the Corn (Maize) Maze that had originally caught our eyes – as there aren’t too many of them around this way, but it turned out that they actually had a couple of things going on beyond the opportunity to get lost in a field.

Corn Maze

I’d never actually been to a Corn Maze before, and neither had the kids (although, Jupiter, being from the United States, had been in dozens), so it was a really cool experience to finally manage to get along to one. It sounds really silly, but it’s very bizarre being dwarfed by corn, although the farm staff had done a great job of cutting wide paths through the field. Rather than just being a maze cut from crops there were also nine signposts which, together, served as an anagram for a mystery word. It gave an extra reason to explore all of the dead ends, which was welcome. The place was a bit muddy, with small feet getting stuck here and there!

Pumpkin Patch

As we’re talking about firsts. Hatter’s Farm didn’t have pre-arranged displays for all of the picked pumpkins. Instead, a lot of them were still left in the field where they had grown, surrounded by their now cut stalks. I’ve been to more than a couple of farms where you can grab pumpkins, but this is the first time that we’ve been able to walk around them where they grew, and that was pretty cool. We all played a game where we needed to run off and find the best examples of things; the greenest Squash, the most perfect pumpkin, the coolest one – and the kids had a great time.

Pumpkin Cannon

While the Corn Maze and pumpkin fields were great, the main appeal was definitely the bizarre-sounding Pumpkin Cannon. It was essentially a high-powered version of a potato launcher, however, it was assembled like an anti-aircraft cannon and took side-loaded onions and squashes. It was, no pun intended, a blast. They had set up three targets in the fields, some of them about 40-50 meters away, and the cannon fired with enough of a force that you could give them a solid hit with the produce. I managed to clip a lump of the board off of the nearest target, and everybody had quite a lot of fun (although it was a bit noisy).

Hatter’s farm was really fun, and unlike most of the farms we’ve visited recently you can just show up on the day without prebooking AND you pay per car rather than per head. The cannon does cost £7 for three shots, but the pumpkins were reasonably priced and we had a great few hours while at the farm – we’ll definitely head back there for next October too! If you are looking to take nice pictures, there are plenty of displays and signs that are perfect for that.

This post is apart of our Blogtober series, all with a Halloween or Autumn theme.