How we verify season dates

Most fall directories will tell you a farm exists. The harder question is whether it is actually open this year, and when. This page explains exactly how that gets answered here, including the cases where the honest answer is “we don’t know yet”.

Where a date comes from

Every season date on this site was read off something the farm published itself — its own website, its own Facebook page, its own ticket store, or in a few cases a PDF or a calendar image on its own site. Dates are never estimated, never inferred from last year, and never copied from another directory.

That last point matters more than it sounds. Fall directories copy each other heavily, and a wrong date propagates across a dozen sites in a weekend. When an aggregator is the only source for a date, it is recorded as a lead to check — not published as fact.

The weekday test

The most common way a fall listing goes wrong is not invention. It is a farm page that was accurate last autumn and never updated. It still reads as current, and the dates on it are a year out.

So every date carrying a day name is checked against this year’s calendar. If a page says “open Saturday, September 26” and September 26 is not a Saturday in 2026, that page is last year’s and the date is rejected rather than republished. It is a simple test and it catches a surprising amount.

A page can also be half-right. Farms routinely update one line and leave another, so each date is tested on its own rather than the page being judged as a whole — a 2026 opening weekend and a leftover 2025 closing date often sit in the same paragraph.

What gets rejected

• Last year’s page. Fails the weekday test above.
• An event, not a season. A single festival weekend or a ticketed evening is not an opening date, unless the event is the farm’s whole fall offering.
• A different crop. An August peach or sunflower opening is not the start of the pumpkin season. Where a farm publishes both, the fall date is the one used.
• Another location’s dates. Multi-site farms often publish one schedule covering several places; a date is only used for the location it actually names.
• Approximate or provisional dates. “Starts around the tenth” and “hoping for the 19th, we’ll confirm” are not published as dates.

What a missing date means

Roughly two thirds of the farms listed here have no season date, and that is reported as it is rather than filled in. It means the farm has not published its 2026 dates yet — not that it is closed. Many post their schedule only days before opening, so coverage climbs steeply through September and October.

What else gets checked

The same standard applies to everything else on a listing. Opening hours are taken from the farm’s own fall schedule, not from a generic business listing — a tree farm’s December hours or a berry farm’s July hours tell a visitor nothing useful in October, so where no fall schedule is published, none is shown. Attractions are recorded only where the farm says it offers them, which means a corn maze mentioned in a review, on a directory, or in a page’s search keywords does not count. Photographs are taken from the farm’s own site, and every image on the site has been looked at by a person.

Farms that have closed, retired, or turned out not to be fall destinations at all are removed rather than left to rot, and the pages they occupied are redirected so nobody lands on a dead link.

Where coverage stands

Figures generated from the live dataset when this page was last built: September 29, 2026.

Corrections

If something here is wrong — a date, an address, a farm that has closed, or a listing that should not exist — tell us and it will be checked against the farm’s own sources and fixed. Farms do not pay to be listed, to rank higher, or to be corrected.

Last reviewed September 29, 2026.