Hands-on harvest for family fun

There are hundreds of pumpkins to choose from, a winding trail through tall stalks of corn and a maze made of straw bales for kids to negotiate.

But you won't find any party jumps or haunted houses at the Great Peter Pumpkin Patch in Two Rock Valley, and owner Larry Peter said that's by design.

Peter, a dairy farmer and owner of Spring Hill Jersey Cheese Co., wants his visitors to experience a real working farm when they come to his place to choose a pumpkin for their Halloween jack-o'-lanterns.

Like many local farmers, school groups and other organizations, he thinks of Halloween and the pumpkin patch tradition in the larger context of harvest time, and less in terms of scary decor and commercial attractions.

Peter, who has owned Spring Hill for 20 years, has taken that theme a step forward, emphasizing education and agriculture to thousands of school kids and families who come through each October.

Where they otherwise might enjoy spooky haunts and games before selecting a pumpkin, Peter has opted to focus instead on farming and what it means.

He deliberately leaves most of his pumpkins growing on the vine so kids can see how they grow before making a choice.

Visitors also can also dig for potatoes they can take home, and try their hands at milking one of the dairy's Jerseys before they taste fresh curds and homemade ice cream.

There are young pigs, about a dozen curious calves and month-old goat twins with their mother to observe and pet, and more than a dozen varieties of pumpkin and squash to consider.

"What we're doing is agriculture for future generations," Peter said.

Dave and Josie Welling of San Rafael were among the visitors Saturday, along their children Kendall, 3, and Carter, 1.

"I heard you could milk cows and dig potatoes, and could have that farm experience," Josie Welling said. "We have pumpkin patches, but they're attached to a shopping mall."

Friends and fellow-Midwesterners Heidi Overman and Stacie Sather, both of Petaluma, showed their young ones something of what they'd experienced in childhood.

Sather, who grew up spending time at her grandma's Minnesota farm, loved watching as her red-haired daughter, Sunshine, 3, run through the corn stalks like she and her sisters and cousins used to do.

"One of the reasons I picked Petaluma," said Overman, a Wisconsin native who came to California via Arizona, "was so the kids could have that kind of experience, sort of, of farm life.

Peter plants one side of the corn field with manure, and the other without so visiting children can see for themselves how the extra nutrients add eight feet of height.

Peter also tells how Irish immigrants - his own ancestors among them - fled famine and potato blight in the mid-19th century, and how many of them came to New York and then San Francisco, finally moved north to raise potatoes, then sheep, chickens, cattle and finally, for many, wine grapes.

But Peter, who grew up on a small farm in Sebastopol where his parents still live and remembers picking grapes to buy school clothes, said he's stuck on cows.

When he bought the 94-year-old Petaluma Creamery two years ago and converted the Spring Hill dairy and cheese factory to an all-organic operation, it was, he said, to keep dairy farming alive and profitable - though it hasn't necessarily proved so yet.

He's just as focused on education, pointing to a spot of land on which he hopes to build an educational center that will focus year-round on agriculture and seasonal products.

"I'm on a mission," Peter said.