Chillin' with a Gopher at the Pumpkin Patch

One of our favorite places in San Diego County is a farm called Bates Nut Farm. While they are open year-round, one of their busiest times is the month of October, pumpkin season. Their 100+ acre family farm is full of pumpkins, animals and special events, and, of course, lots of people.

For this year’s annual trek to the pumpkin patch, we decided to take advantage of the half-day the Princesses P have on Tuesdays and go to the pumpkin patch when there would be no crowds. A beautiful and hot October day, we did the usual:

We arrived and parked right up front – only a handful of cars instead of the usual hundreds and hundreds!

We did the prerequisite photo op…(left to right: Princess P, Gail, Princess Sweetie Pie, Tiffany)…

and another photo op…(left to right: Princess Sweetie Pie, Tiffany, Gail and Princess P front right)…

and yet another…(left to right: Princess P and Princess Sweetie Pie)…

and another…

and still another (left to right: Princess P, Tiffany, Princess Sweetie Pie)!

Then we headed over to the pumpkin patch to find the perfect pumpkin!

Princess P with her perfect pumpkin.

Princess Sweetie Pie with her perfect pumpkin. Then, more posing with pumpkins:

While looking for that perfect pumpkin and posing on the Big Mac pumpkins, the Princesses P spied a little hole in the ground:

And the dirt was moving!

What’s in there?

Out popped a gopher!

Of course they were excited to see a real, live gopher! I was excited to see a real, live gopher! In all my advanced years, I have never seen a real, live gopher! Only gopher holes (really not “holes” but mounds of dirt all over my yard – I have so many gopher mounds in my yard that I wrote a post about it once: By Way of the Dodo Bird).

The gopher didn’t seem to be afraid, at all, and kept poking his head out, gathering grass in his cheeks and going back down into his hole again and coming up for more grass (I guess nesting material inside his hole?). So cute!

Some close-up photos of the gopher in action!

As the sun set in the West, we went on a hayride, all by ourselves in the front car of a very long, hayride train pulled by a tractor and made more pumpkin season memories!

More pumpkin memories from the past: