No gate fee, no rides, no maze — you pay $0.60 a pound for pumpkins and $1.50 a pound for apples, which makes this the cheapest honest way to leave the Poconos with a carving pumpkin, provided you call first about apple availability.
There is no gate admission - you pay by weight for what you pick. Pumpkins $0.60 per pound and apples $1.50 per pound at the time of research.
Free to walk in. Your spend here is whatever you choose — pumpkins, food, and any paid activities. That makes it a low-risk stop if you are not sure how long the kids will last.
This is a pay-by-weight orchard, and understanding what that means will decide whether you love it or leave disappointed. There is no admission, no wristband, no maze, no jumping pillow and no wagon queue. You arrive, you pick, you weigh, you pay, you go. Sixty cents a pound for pumpkins, a dollar fifty for apples.
Run the numbers against the alternative. A ticketed Poconos festival farm will take fifteen to twenty-five dollars a head at the gate — sixty to a hundred for a family of four — and then sell you a pumpkin on the way out. Here, two decent fifteen-pound carving pumpkins cost about eighteen dollars total, and the entry cost is zero. Add a half-bushel of apples at roughly thirty dollars, a jug of cider and a mum, and you are leaving with a car full for well under what the other place charges to walk in.
That is not an argument that ticketed farms are a rip-off; they are selling a different thing, and children know the difference. It is an argument for being clear about which thing you are buying today.
The farm’s own page carried a warning that an April freeze had hit the strawberry, sour cherry and apple crops, and directed people to Facebook or the phone for current availability. That is a farm telling the truth about a hard spring rather than quietly letting visitors arrive to empty rows, and it should be read as a good sign about the operation and a genuine caution about the trip.
Practically: pumpkins are a separate crop with a separate growing season and are far less likely to be affected by a spring freeze than tree fruit. Apples are the item at risk. If you are driving an hour for apples, make the call. If you are driving for pumpkins, the risk is much lower — but the fall dates had not been posted either, so a call still closes both questions at once.
Nine to six, every day. Most of the fall operations within twenty miles of here open Thursday or Friday through Sunday and pack their entire season into a few dozen hours. That is why October Saturdays feel the way they do. A farm that opens seven days lets you go on a Tuesday morning in the middle of the harvest with nobody else in the rows, which is a genuinely better experience than the same field on a Saturday afternoon.
One seasonal note on that closing time. Six o’clock in late September is comfortably in daylight. Six o’clock in the last week of October, at Poconos elevation, is dark and cold. The same published hours describe two quite different visits, and if you are picking with small children late in the season you want to be there by mid-afternoon.
No maze, no rides, no petting zoo, no play area. If your children are expecting a farm day in the modern sense, this will read as a shopping trip with mud. Set expectations in the car, or pair it with an attraction farm on the same road. The farm has been running since 1962, presses its own cider, sells mums, and switches over to cut-your-own Christmas trees in December — it is a working orchard with a long memory, not an events business, and it is priced accordingly.
The farm is open daily, 9am to 6pm, which is rare enough in this region to be the headline. It had not announced its fall pick-your-own dates when we last checked — the page said dates would be posted — so the field opening is the unknown, not the hours. A weekday morning is the obvious play: the big ticketed farms in Monroe County are shut Monday to Wednesday and this one is not. Late in the season, a 6pm close is well after dark, so an early-October afternoon and a late-October afternoon are different visits.
Forty-five minutes to an hour and a half. There is no attraction circuit to work through — you pick, you weigh, you pay. That is a feature if you have a short window or a reluctant teenager, and a problem if you were expecting to fill a day.
Being open every day is the crowd answer. The pressure that builds at weekends-only farms simply does not concentrate here in the same way. October Saturdays will still be the busiest, but a Tuesday at 9am should be close to yourself and the staff.
Not published. Assume unpaved orchard parking, soft after rain — the standard for a Route 115 farm that has been running since 1962.
Not published. Pick-your-own in an orchard means uneven ground and grass rows by definition; the market side is likely easier. Call 570-629-1191 if this matters to your group.
You have children who want rides, mazes, slides or a play area. There are none here, and a child promised a farm day and given an orchard will let you know about it. Skip it too if apples are the specific goal this season without phoning first, because the crop took a hit.
Effort sits on Route 115 in Monroe County, the same corridor as the larger Poconos maze farms. The sensible combination is to buy your pumpkins cheaply by weight here and pay for the maze or the rides at a ticketed farm down the road, rather than paying festival prices for both.
Nothing. There is no gate admission. You pay by weight for what you pick — $0.60 per pound for pumpkins and $1.50 per pound for apples at the time we researched this.
Not announced when we last checked. The farm's pick-your-own page said fall dates would be posted, so the season start is genuinely unpublished. The farm directs visitors to its Facebook page or a phone call on 570-629-1191 for current availability.
Check first. The farm's own page warned that an April freeze had affected the strawberry, sour cherry and apple pick-your-own, so apple availability in particular is uncertain. This is not a farm being vague — it is a farm being straight with people about a bad spring.
Daily, 9am to 6pm. Pick-your-own runs rain or shine but closes in severe weather.
2026 dates had not been published when we last checked. In past seasons it has run: Daily. Check with the farm before driving out.
Admission is free. There is no gate admission - you pay by weight for what you pick. Pumpkins $0.60 per pound and apples $1.50 per pound at the time of research.
3009 Route 115, Effort, PA 18330, in Monroe County. It is one of 4 patches we track in Northeast Pennsylvania.
We track 4 patches in Northeast Pennsylvania, 1 of which are free to walk into. Entry here costs nothing, which puts it in the minority even in a region with several free options.
What sets it apart locally: it has u-pick fields, which most Northeast Pennsylvania patches on our list do not.
One caveat worth repeating: this farm had not published its 2026 dates when we last checked, while 2 of the 4 patches we track in Northeast Pennsylvania had. Treat any date you see elsewhere as last year's until the farm confirms it.
There are 4 other patches we track in Monroe County. All Northeast Pennsylvania patches →
Map pin is set to the town centre. Navigate to the street address above, not the pin.
heckmanorchards.com
Checked August 2026.