Winterset's family-friendly The Pumpkin Ranch set to close at the end of October
Jennifer Handsaker didn't think about bees before her family opened The Pumpkin Ranch in Winterset.
“Honestly, when we first started, I never considered bees. You have to have bees to pollinate, so we have a bee haven," said Handsaker, alluding to companies that maintain and rent out beehives to various agricultural businesses. "He brings his bees ― there’s probably a solid 20 to 30 hives that he’ll bring in the spring and they stay until fall and then we do move them off the farm in the fall when we open.”
Now, after a decade of entertaining central Iowans each autumn with pumpkin picking and other activities, The Pumpkin Ranch, 2425 Hiatt Apple Trail, will close on Oct. 30.
More:Here's your gore galore guide to 8 scary Halloween haunts in the Des Moines metro area
When the Handsakers first opened the family-friendly pumpkin patch, they kept it simple: a couple of acres of pumpkins, a corn maze the family cut themselves and a bounce house. The family bought the land 17 years ago and never intended to open a pumpkin business, but when her husband Dave pitched it, the idea stuck.
Originally from Ames and Nevada, Iowa, respectively, Handsaker and her husband both came from agricultural backgrounds, but only ended up building their family business around pumpkins because it seemed fun.
The venue has grown since opening and now in its final days The Pumpkin Ranch offers hay rides, Toddler Town — a playground made for guests under age 5 — as well as a kid-centric farm ninja obstacle course and a mega corn maze that takes up 10 acres that Time Magazine called one of the nation's most notable "mazes with a message."
“Everything here we’ve done ourselves, except for the corn maze, which somebody else has cut, but we put in the jump pillow, we put in the poles and the zip lines, we’ve made the slide hill and the platforms," Handsaker explained. "Every year it was just, what can we add that people can enjoy and that we can do?”
That first year, Handsaker estimates The Pumpkin Ranch entertained about 1,000 people. Over the years, word spread and The Pumpkin Ranch started to be open on Fridays to accommodate area field trip requests. Now the locale typically staffs more than 30 employees each fall.
“(Now) we’re open now six to seven weekends… and we put through about 25,000 to 30,000 people in that time frame," Handsaker said.
More:Here are 10 must-see pumpkin patches and corn mazes around Des Moines to visit this fall
The venue isn't closing because of a lack of interest, employees or funds. Rather, The Pumpkin Ranch is coming to an end because the Handsaker family's kids are getting older. Jennifer and Dave, who founded the ranch, want to be able to spend time with them since the teens are likely only going to be living with their parents for a few more years.
"Dave and I — we’re older for kids our age. Our kids are 14 and 17 now, but you know he’s 53 and I’m going to be 50. I think you start taking account of life and just go, ‘OK, these kids aren’t home much longer. How do we want to finish out our years at home with them?’” Handsaker said. “That was really the deciding factor for us. This business has been an incredible blessing for our family, such a huge blessing but we just kind of felt like, you know, I think it’s time for us to do something different.”
People might think of The Pumpkin Ranch as a purely seasonal thing, but it's a business that's been her full-time job for the past five years while her husband has maintained his regular day job, separate from The Pumpkin Ranch, in business development. The ranch demands things like planting in May and committing to the size of a crop is a decision made even before that.
All the while, the family has to fold the business into the little bumps and surprises of a typical day-to-day life. When the Des Moines Register planned to speak to the entire Handsaker family on Friday, Dave and the kids had to contend with a flat tire rather than be at the ranch.
While this season marks the end of the family's time with The Pumpkin Ranch, Handsaker expressed the possibility of allowing someone else to continue the name.
“We have an auction (on Nov. 5). All of this is going to be off of our property," she said, gesturing to the dozens of amenities populating the farm. Everything from the giant pool of corn kernels kids are invited to play in to the boutique shopping barn nestled near the entrance of The Pumpkin Ranch will be gone next year.
“We would love for someone to be able to take The Pumpkin Ranch name and business and carry that on.”
Either way, come autumn of 2023, the family will no longer be running The Pumpkin Ranch and will have to find other ways of filling the free time Handsaker has yet to fully fathom.
“We’re big Iowa State fans, so we have tickets to games that we don’t use so we’ll be able to use those again," Handsaker said. "We’ll go to the bridge festival. We’ll go do the things we don’t do now.”
The ranch is open every Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., every Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and every Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. for the rest of the month.
More information about The Pumpkin Ranch can be found online at thepumpkinranch.com.
Isaac Hamlet covers arts, entertainment and culture at the Des Moines Register. Reach him at ihamlet@gannett.com or 319-600-2124, follow him on Twitter @IsaacHamlet.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: The Pumpkin Ranch, after a decade in Winterset, to close on Oct. 30
