The arrival of the coronavirus earlier this year may have derailed our 2020 Spring Festival, but we’re planning to be back this fall better than ever!
We started Barton Hill Farms back in 2012 to provide a place for friends and family to escape from the city and screens. Now after months of sheltering at home, we’re all more eager than ever to get outside and enjoy the beautiful sites of Texas!
With over 100 acres of rolling farmland and a 14-acre Lounging Lawn, we have plenty of space to spread out and keep your distance from others. Plus, we’ve implemented new farm policies to provide a safe environment for both visitors and staff. These include online ticket pre-sales, cashless operations, and extra sanitation efforts based on CDC guidance.
We’ve also taken this time to make some exciting changes to our space and offerings, and we’re looking forward to sharing them with you. So here are a few of the updates we’re working on this spring and summer. We can’t wait for you all to come out to the farm for the best Fall Festival yet!
Semi-Private Cabanas
With a space as large as ours, sometimes you want to have a “headquarters” where everyone can gather for meals and breaks from the activity. So we’ve built rentable cabanas to provide a shaded home base for the whole family.
Each cabana includes a 12’ x 14’ covered space with bench seating and comes with 12 bottles of water. There’s also a connected 16’ x 12’ uncovered area with staff controlled fire pit for your exclusive use. Add the optional s’mores package and toast marshmallows over the fire-weather permitted!
These spaces will be available for half-day rentals during our Spring and Fall Festivals, and can accommodate up to 12 people. They provide a perfect place for older family members to relax in the shade, and a comfortable spot for lunch or snacks.
New & Improved Food
We’ve made some major upgrades to the food here at Barton Hill Farms this year. To start, we’ve added more food stands to provide more variety and reduce lines. We now have seven distinct food and beverage stations, all operating on a cashless system.
At Grady’s Grill & Smokehaus, get a juicy cheeseburger made from all-natural pasture-raised Barton Hill Farms beef patties. Or try a fresh pulled pork sandwich with a side of potato chips.
Over at the Fry House, we’ll be serving hand-dipped chicken tenders, made fresh every day. Plus, there are carnival-style funnel cakes, and lightly pasteurized apple cider.
We also have cheese and pepperoni pizzas, French fries, salads, and freshly made lemonade. And as always, everything at Barton Hill Farms has NO high fructose corn syrup.
We will not offer soda this season.
Once you have your meal, where are you going to eat it? We’ve added extra shaded seating to foster social distancing. There’s now 6,000 square feet of covered eating space at BHF, so you can enjoy your food while keeping your distance from other diners.
Barton Hugël Apfelwein & Biergarten
Hold on to your lederhosen, folks, because this may be the most exciting update this year! Introducing the Barton Hill Cider & Beer Garden — or the Barton Hugël Apfelwein & Biergarten, as they’d say in Germany.
We’ve taken a quirky, vintage raspa trailer from the 1960s and converted it into a portable keg room and tap wall. Grown-up guests can get a frosty local brew or cider, and sip away in the nearly 2,000 square foot shaded seating area.
This little oasis will feature a wall of hop vines and hanging plants to provide a lush getaway from the heat of the afternoon. Take a break while the kids play, or gather with friends for a cold drink in the open air.
Safety and Sustainability
Our guests are a priority and we take their health and safety very seriously. We will be training our staff on providing a safe and fun experience for all our guests and will post updates on our website & social media regarding any necessary changes to our fall event. We will be open select Fridays this season. We have doubled our hand washing and sanitizer stations. There will be more signs than usual. We do ask that all visitors to our farm follow the farm’s adoption of policies on social distancing and that everyone respect the well-being of others.
Our Fall Festival and Pumpkin Patch is a family tradition for many of our visitors, and we aim to keep that tradition alive. Part of that effort is safety in this season, but another part is keeping this land viable and healthy in the long term.
That’s why we’re big proponents of regenerative farming practices to keep soil fertile and biodiverse. This is something we’re strongly committed to, and we’ll be sharing more in the future about the steps we’re taking to keep the land nutrient-rich and abundant.
We hope that a visit to Barton Hill Farms will be more than a fun day out — although it certainly will be that! We also want to get the children of Central Texas interested in where their food comes from and how we can all be better stewards of our farmland.
We look forward to a day of fun and learning with you this fall!
