Southern Illinois pumpkin patches

What to expect in Southern Illinois

4 of the 23 Illinois patches we track are in Southern Illinois, spread across Madison County, St. Clair County, Union County. 2 of them run a corn or crop maze, and 2 have farm animals your kids can get close to.

2 patches here are free to walk into, which makes them the low-risk option with unpredictable toddlers — you are not out $80 if the visit lasts twenty minutes.

This is real pumpkin country. Farms here grow their own crop and cut mazes into their own corn, which also means the season ends when the weather says so: a hard frost takes the maze down, and some farms keep the patch open a week or two after it. Two practical consequences. Daylight collapses through October, so a farm that closes "at dark" gives you over an hour less on Halloween weekend than it did in late September. And field parking after autumn rain is the single most common complaint at farms in this part of the country — boots, not trainers.

Illinois grows more pumpkins than any other state — most of it processing crop concentrated around Morton, which has called itself the Pumpkin Capital of the World for decades. That does not mean every farm below supplies a cannery, but it does mean the pumpkins you see in an Illinois field are very likely to have grown there.