West Virginia Fall Pumpkin Fest

Maybe I’m a cheapskate, but I really like designing and cutting my own Corn Maze each year.  I know I could spend lots of money and have the Battle of Hastings or a portrait of Barak Obama designed professionally to fit my cornfield, with GPS coordinates provided and all that, but I’d still have to cut it myself. And don’t we already have enough digital in our lives?  So every year I make the decision to do it all myself…well, with a lot of help from the summer crew.  We all take ownership of the corn maze, and by the time we’ve finished sketching, measuring, cutting, running out of gas, sweltering in the July heat, we’ve got a corn maze with soul.

And one of my favorite corn maze devices is circles.  Not as mysterious as crop circles, mind you, but often just as baffling.  When a path through the corn maze comes to a circle, one is confronted with multiple options.  Some lead nowhere.  Others lead somewhere, but just not the right somewhere.  And yes, one is the right path. At Ridgefield Farm, our corn maze always has lots of circles.cutting-the-corn-maze

But for some insane reason, my circles have to be perfectly formed.  One kid stands in the middle with a tape measure, or rope, or sometimes a pole.  Another holds the other end tightly at just the right measurement and walks in a circle around the first kid, thus maintaining a perfect radius.  Cautiously, the person on the mower follows close behind.  Ah, yes.  Perfectly round!  Perfectly done!

Here’s a link to the largest corn maze in the world!

Don’t you just love to set off on a confounding path through a corn maze?  The twist and turns.   The false hopes dashed.  You’re cookin’ now.  You’ve gotten your stride.  Oops!  Drat!  Another dead end.  Now where was that turn I should have taken back there?

The corn is growing,  (about knee-high now, though we’re well past the 4th of July!), and it’s definitely time to cut the paths for this year’s corn maze before it gets too tall and way too difficult to cut.  We waited a bit too long once, and we found it very challenging and not particularly fun to chop our way through 5 acres of corn.

It’s hard for us to design our maze layout too far ahead, because when we do we often find Mother Nature sticking it to us again for trying to be efficient.  Thin patches of corn that will clearly not grow high enough to conceal pathways predictably fall squarely on spots where a complicated juncture or a needed connection is planned.

So now it’s time.  We can adjust our layout to accommodate those sections of recalcitrant corn.  But it’s still a daunting task.  Armed with graph paper, orange flags, and 300′ tape measures, we tromp all about the field double-checking each measurement, so the design we laboriously created on paper (and Excel spreadsheets!) can be transferred to a most irregularly shaped field.  This we do during July’s most inhospitable heat.

Is it going to be difficult enough?  Is it lame?  That’s always been my greatest worry each PumpkinFest at the farm.  Is everyone going to be able to race through it in 5 minutes?  This year, I think not.