It’s October, and the residents of Clark County must have their pumpkins: orange, white, gray or green; smooth, wrinkly or warty; squashed, spherical or delightfully asymmetrical. The glorious gourds are here for a short season, and local pumpkin patches are ready for you to come and get them.
Joe’s Place Farms, 701 N.E. 112th Ave., Vancouver, is the perfect place to start. It’s a true urban pumpkin patch, just east of Interstate 205 and just north of Mill Plain Boulevard, open every day through Halloween with free admission. It’s an easy-to-navigate patch where everything is condensed onto several accessible acres: there’s the famous wooden Fort Maze ($2) and hayrides with apples (also $2, all day on weekends and 4 to 5:30 p.m. weekdays), a three-acre corn maze, a hay bale stack and a cornstalk teepee roomy enough for two or three adults and a passel of children.
Save room in your wheelbarrow for the stars of the show: pumpkins and gourds in a dazzling array of colors, shapes and sizes. “We have the biggest selection of pumpkins and decorative gourds in Clark County,” said Joe Beaudoin, owner of the farm, along with his wife, Gayle. “A couple varieties we developed ourselves, like Mr. Wrinkles.” He added that they’ve also been breeding their own vividly hued decorative corn for about 40 years.
Family traditions
The farm is the kind of place that families return to year after year. “We get people that came here as kids, then they become parents and bring their kids, sometimes three generations,” noted Beaudoin, whose family has been farming the land since 1946. Joe and Gayle Beaudoin started selling produce out of their garage in the early 1970s; after about 10 years, they decided it was time to build a farm store. Now it’s a sophisticated operation with a baker and six employees, one of whom has been trained by Washington State University Extension as a master food preserver.
