BON ACCORD, Alta. – Halloween doesn’t scare Tam Anderson.
The fall event stuffed with scarecrows, ghosts and witches has transformed October into a profitable month on Anderson’s Prairie Gardens farm north of Edmonton.
This year the Haunted Pumpkin Festival is expected to attract 20,000 people, including 6,500 school kids during October, up from 300 the first year of the festival.
“Sometimes I feel like I have a tiger by the tail. Other times it’s fun and very rewarding,” said Anderson on a soggy fall afternoon.
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Strawberries were one of the first additions to the 25 acre farm to attract visitors from the city. The U-pick strawberry operation was a natural progression from the bedding plant season.
Ten years ago Anderson planted a few rows of pumpkins as another farm diversification project. The patch morphed into the popular pumpkin festival that includes pumpkin carving, puppet shows, an enchanted forest, a haunted house, a skeleton band, a scarecrow building, wagon rides and a pumpkin cannon.
The cannon was designed out of necessity when bad weather one year ruined the pumpkin crop, leaving Anderson with a field of “scar face” pumpkins. Anderson’s brother built an air cannon that shoots pumpkins far into the field.
Depending on the season, Anderson normally grows 5,000 to 20,000 pumpkins for sale, to decorate the site and to give away to visiting schoolchildren. Hot weather this summer created ideal conditions for pumpkin growing and more than 100,000 pumpkins grew in the seven acre patch.
“The yield was absolutely phenomenal.”
This year Anderson added two corn mazes to entice visitors to the farm in August.
“We found that it was neat to have income in August. We’re always searching for alternative income streams,” she said.
Having thousands of visitors descend on the farm isn’t without its challenges. With crowds comes the need for more parking spaces, portable toilets, seating areas and areas for lineups to the Halloween buildings.
Spreading the people throughout the farm to the corn mazes, trails and petting zoos helps reduce congestion around the central greenhouses that double as shelters during wet fall weather.
“With the new six acre corn maze, you can have an awful lot of people, but it doesn’t feel crowded,” she said.
Not every farmer is willing to open his farm to visitors. As more people migrate to the city, Anderson said it’s important for farmers to offer city folks an invitation to see where their food is grown and provide a connection to agriculture.
“They want to put a face on agriculture. People really want to meet the people growing the food.”
As part of the invitation to the country, Anderson helped develop the popular Country Soul Stroll, a self guided driving tour of more than 20 farms, orchards, artisans and cultural events around Edmonton. The visitors are amazed at the variety of activities to do in the country.
“Be prepared for people to consider it to be their farm,” she said.
As land prices go up, especially near the city, it becomes increasingly more difficult to pay for the land through traditional agriculture.
Anderson and her husband, Terry, have another two sections of land nearby where they grow traditional crops like wheat and canola, but also 23 specialty grasses.
“There are opportunities for farmers on traditional farms to bring in on-farm income and stay at home,” said Anderson who sees opportunity for live theatre in their hip roof barn or educational experiences in their 30 acres of old growth forest on the other farm site sometime in the future.
