Duvall's Fall Farm Season Doesn't Start Once. It Starts Twice.

Ask anyone in Duvall when pumpkin season begins and you'll get the same answer: late September. That's true, but it's also incomplete in a way that matters if you're actually trying to plan a Saturday. Duvall runs two working farms that flip into harvest mode every fall, and they don't open on the same day, don't charge the same way, and don't keep the same hours. Treat them as one continuous season and you'll drive out to one of them expecting it to be running and find the gate closed.

The Six Days When Only One Farm Is Open

Muddy Boots Pumpkins, on West Snoqualmie River Road, opens its 2026 season on Saturday, September 26. Novelty Hill Farm, the Pickering family's farm that's been working the same ground since 1884, doesn't open its pumpkin patch until the following Friday, October 2. That's a six-day stretch, including one full weekend, where Muddy Boots is the only harvest-season option in town.

If your family tradition is "first weekend of pumpkin season," that first weekend is Muddy Boots by default. Novelty Hill isn't being slow. It's just running on its own calendar, and nothing about the two farms' schedules assumes you know that.

Two Farms, Two Very Different Rulebooks

Once both farms are open, the difference isn't just geography. It's the entire operating model.

Muddy Boots operates like a seasonal attraction. It's open seven days a week, and Friday and Saturday nights it stays open until 10pm specifically so people can walk the corn maze after dark with a flashlight. That's not a marketing flourish. The maze genuinely changes once the sun goes down, and the farm builds its late hours around that.

Novelty Hill runs more like what it's always been: a family farm that opens its gates to visitors a few days a week. General admission is free and the farm is dog friendly on a leash. Specific attractions like the hay mow, the trike track and the corn crib are bundled into their own combined price, but you're not paying anything just to walk in, see the animals, and pick a pumpkin.

Neither model is better. They're just different enough that showing up expecting one and getting the other will throw off your afternoon.

The Scarecrow Detail That Makes the Maze Worth Doing Twice

Muddy Boots didn't just plant a corn maze when it added one in 2017. It built a scavenger hunt into it. Ten scarecrow scenes are hidden throughout the maze every season, and the payoff for finding all ten is a prize back at the Pumpkin Shack. It's the kind of detail that turns a maze from a one-and-done activity into something a family does more than once in a season, since finding nine out of ten scarecrows on your first pass basically guarantees a second trip.

The night version is a separate experience, not just a later time slot. Friday and Saturday nights, the same maze that reads as a straightforward challenge in daylight becomes disorienting once you're relying on a flashlight beam instead of sightlines. If you've only ever done the daytime maze, the night version isn't a rerun. It's a different maze wearing the same footprint.

What "Free" Actually Buys You at Novelty Hill

It's worth being precise about what free admission means at Novelty Hill, because it's not the same thing as a free day out. Walking the grounds, seeing the animals, and browsing the pumpkin patch itself doesn't cost anything at the gate. But the activities most kids actually want, the hay mow, the trike track, the corn crib, are sold as a bundle, so the real cost of a visit depends on how much of that bundle your family plans to use.

That's a fair trade for a farm running Friday through Sunday only, three days a week instead of seven. If your only open day is a Tuesday, Novelty Hill simply isn't the option that week. Muddy Boots is.

The Rest of the Season Is Already Running Underneath This

Both farms are opening into a town that's already mid-rhythm for fall. The Duvall Farmers Market keeps running every Thursday afternoon through mid-October at Taylor Landing, which means for a few weeks in late September and early October, Duvall residents have three separate seasonal calendars going at once: the Thursday market, the Muddy Boots corn maze running daily, and Novelty Hill coming online on weekends. None of these three defer to each other. They just overlap.

The Snoqualmie Valley Trail threads past all of it. It's the same trail corridor that runs from Taylor Landing through town, and it's an easy way to string a farmers market stop and a farm visit into one outing without needing to move the car twice.

A Practical Way to Actually Plan Around This

Here's what the overlap looks like in practice, if you're trying to get the most out of the next six weeks without wasting a drive:

• Weeknights through September: Muddy Boots is your only option. It's open every day, Novelty Hill isn't running yet.
• The first weekend of October: both farms are open for the first time simultaneously. This is the one weekend where you can genuinely choose between the ticketed, all-week attraction and the free, weekend-only working farm.
• Any Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday after October 2: Novelty Hill is closed. Muddy Boots isn't.
• Friday and Saturday nights: if you want the night maze, that's Muddy Boots only, and bring your own flashlight.
• Thursday afternoons through mid-October: the farmers market at Taylor Landing is still running underneath all of it, so a Thursday can double as a market stop plus a Muddy Boots visit before the market closes for the season.

None of this requires choosing a favorite. It just means checking which farm's schedule matches the day you actually have free, rather than assuming both are running because "it's pumpkin season."

The Thing Worth Knowing Before You Drive Out There

The easy version of this story is "Duvall has pumpkin patches, here's when they open." The more useful version is that the town's fall season isn't one calendar, it's two, running on different economics, different hours, and a six-day head start that belongs entirely to one farm. If you've lived here a while and only ever been to one of the two, the other one isn't a lesser version of the same experience. It's a genuinely different day out, and now you know which day of the week it actually falls on.

If you're already picturing which Duvall porch is going to hand out the best candy this Halloween, or you've been quietly wondering what your home near Taylor Landing might be worth in this market, Amanda Sipos knows this town block by block, farm by farm, and season by season. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk about what's next.