The Fall Festival and Pumpkin Patch at Barton Hill Farms is almost here! We’ve been getting ready all summer, and we can’t wait to welcome you back to the farm.
If you’ve been out to Barton Hill Farms before, you know that one of the highlights of the fall season is our corn maze. At 3.5 acres, it’s the coolest corn maze in the Austin area (as far as we know!). We do a new corn maze theme every year, and we’re particularly excited about this year’s design…
Jinkies!
Hop in the Mystery Machine and come on down, because the 2020 corn maze celebrates a pup named Scooby-Doo!
BHF owners Craig and Pamela watched this classic cartoon when they were kids back in the 80s, and even now their own children enjoy the show. So we knew this theme would be fun for kids and adults alike and get everyone into the Halloween spirit.
Visitors to the corn maze will get to wander through a labyrinth in the shape of the Great Dane himself, learning Scooby-Doo trivia along the way. And as a show that has been on both TV and film for over 50 years, there is a lot of trivia to learn!
For example: Fred, Velma, Daphne, and Shaggy were originally going to be named Geoff, Linda, Kelly, and W.W. It’s hard to imagine Scooby saying, “Ruh-roh, W.W.!” And Scooby-Doo’s original name was Too Much!
How do you build a corn maze?
It all starts with the corn. We plant our 3.5 acres of corn for the maze in mid-July to give it plenty of time to grow tall and lush.
As it’s starting to take seed, we lay out our design. We team up with a company called The Maize that specializes in corn maze designs, so we know it will look just right.
To get the path into the corn, we first place the design on a 30” grid to create a scale drawing. Then we lay out the corn field on the same grid, and mark each square with flags while the corn is still just tiny shoots. We mow the shape into the young corn, and continue to trim it up every few days until the pathways are well established.
So when you come out to the farm in a few weeks, it will look like this:
Honoring Joe Ruby
Scooby-Doo was created by storywriting team Joe Ruby and Ken Spears in the late 1960s. The pair invented the characters and wrote or story edited the first 25 episodes of the show.
No one could have expected that their little cartoon would have gone on to be such an important part of the culture of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Comic books, movies, merchandise, games, and countless parodies have all been inspired by those wacky cartoon mysteries!
Joe Ruby passed away just a few weeks ago at the age of 87. Thank you, Joe, for the smiles that you’ve brought to generations of children!
Come solve the mystery!
Scooby-Doo and the gang always kept their mysteries fun and not-too-spooky, and we aim to do the same with our corn maze. Adventurers should be able to solve it within about 30 minutes, and there are emergency exits if you need to leave early.
“Hold on, man. We don’t go anywhere with ‘scary,’ ‘spooky,’ ‘haunted,’ or ‘forbidden’ in the title.” – Shaggy
When you’re done with the maze, grab some “Scooby Snacks” from one of our many food stands. We’ll have pizza, hand-dipped chicken tenders, applewood smoked pulled pork sandwiches and 100% all-natural beef burgers. And the grown-ups can relax with a cold drink in the Biergarten, while the kids wear themselves out with activities like the Jumping Pillow, Apple Cannons, and shooting hoops.
We’ve reduced capacity for our farm days this fall, and added seven additional days to our season. Tickets to our Austin-area festival and corn maze are expected to sell out this year, so make sure to get yours early!
Tickets sales start on September 15th. Sign up for our mailing list to be notified when tickets are available!
