pumpkins from hitscherhof farm

We took our last pumpkin-buying trip to Hitscherhof today. It is sad to know that we're going to have to find a new place to get our Halloween pumpkins next year. It took us several years to find this place and it's perfect for us! There's a barn, pretty backgrounds, gorgeous fall colors, a corn maze...and they sell pumpkin wine. You just can't complain about a place like that! Hitscherhof is definitely on the list of things I will miss about Germany.

The best time to go is the last weekend of September. That is when they have their annual Farm Fest with local produce and craft vendors galore. If you can't make that weekend though (as we weren't able to this year) the pumpkin shop is open all the way up through October 31st. Prices are extremely reasonable. If you buy your pumpkins at the commissary and then see the prices here you will kick yourself. We bought six pumpkins this year (five to carve, one to send to school with Jake for a project) and spent less than 20 Euro. The people are nice, the pumpkins have plenty of character...the drive isn't bad either. It's definitely worth checking out.

To my relief, Sam is exiting his "anti-camera" phase. Getting pictures of him over the last two years has been very difficult. I'm not sure what has prompted this change of heart but I'm not going to argue about it!

Of course, now that Sam is exiting that phase we have another kid entering it. Isn't that just our luck? Jake isn't exactly against getting his picture taken...he's just really good about not being around when we're taking them. The boy is a ninja. We didn't get any decent shots of him looking at the pumpkins but Jason did snap this one of him playing on the rocks.


Zander was a little madman while we were there. (Anyone shocked? No? I didn't think so!) He couldn't decide where to start or stop or stay or...well, you get the general idea. He ran here and there and everywhere. The best way to get a picture of the kid? Stick him on top of the biggest pumpkin we could find! He had an absolute blast.

We took so many pictures of Izzy that picking just one to put on here was extremely difficult. I think this one that Jason took was really great though. Izzy had so much fun crawling around exploring the farm. He climbed the pumpkins, ate the grass, put leaves on top of the boulders, and grinned the whole time. Surprisingly enough, he even kept his hat on most of the afternoon. How very agreeable of him!

Of course, we took a ton of pictures of all four kids together. It was our standard "exercise in futility". Honestly, the best thing about taking pictures of all four kids together is putting them in order, one after the other, and letting the world see them in a "candid" format. I may do that another time but today we got a decent one so I'll just share this.

All in all it was a wonderful afternoon. We enjoyed every year we spent finding our pumpkins at Hitscherhof. It will be interesting to see where we are this time next year!