On Sunday afternoon we trekked up to Milky Way Farm to pick a pumpkin for our Halloween needs.
Milky Way Farm is just up route 113 from the house, on the other side of 100. The farm is home to many dairy cows that provide milk to Land-O-Lakes. It is a working milk farm. In the fall, they offer pick-your-own pumpkins from the large patch behind the milk barn.
Berta, Abby, and I boarded the hay wagon for the ride out to the end of the pumpkin patch. It was a leisurely ride on bales of hay in a wagon pulled behind the farm tractor. The farm is really not that big, but they have a very nice patch of land, and plenty of space for their pumpkin patch.
We walked around for quite a while looking for a pumpkin that wasn’t smashed or rotting. I think we should have started our pumpkin search last week or earlier to get a better selection, because there wasn’t much left.
Anyway, after walking around a while, we finally did encounter a decent pumpkin. It’s reasonably large, but didn’t fit into the farm’s “Jumbo” category. We hauled it to the wagon and headed back toward the barns.
I lugged the pumpkin back to the car while Berta and Abby went to check out the farm animals. They had cows, of course, but also pigs, chickens, and goats. One of the cows was very friendly, and nearly licked Abby’s face. Ew.
I gave Abby a leaf from a tree to feed to the goats and they ate it so fast that she barely noticed it had left her hand. It was pretty funny how excite the goats got to be fed a tree leaf instead of the hay.
After we had seen all of the animals, we walked over to the Chester Springs Creamery, which makes ice cream from the cow’s milk produced on the farm. I got only two small cups of ice cream since Berta really isn’t allowed to eat it in her pregnant state. The one I got for me was black raspberry, and the one I got for Abby was labeled, “Abby’s Cinnamon Apple.” Well, that seemed like an omen.
As far as the ice cream quality goes, the raspberry was pretty good. But the apple was some of the best ice cream I’ve ever had. Come Thanksgiving, I think we’ll take a trip back to the Creamery and see if we can get a tub for scooping with our pumpkin pie.
And that’s our trip to the farm. Much better than last year’s Northbrook Orchard disappointment. It would still be nice to have a good orchard to visit in the fall. Fresh apples are the best.
Now it’s just a matter of carving that pumpkin. The way my after-work schedule looks until Halloween, the girls might be doing it themselves this year, instead of me doing all of the hard work. Heh, heh.
