Free parking and free entry at a working Warren County orchard with a bakery, so the only money you spend is money you chose to spend — but the farm publishes no maze or hayride price and no fall season dates.
Free parking and entry. U-pick apples priced by container: peck $18, half bushel $29, bushel $46. The farm's site does not publish a price for the corn maze or hayrides.
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.
Irons Fruit Farm is an orchard first. That framing is the useful one, because it explains both what is good about the place and what is missing from its listing.
What is good: entry and parking are free, the farm is open daily rather than weekends-only, and there is a bakery turning out donuts, cider and fritters. Free entry changes the risk profile of a family outing more than anything else on a listing page. If your two-year-old melts down in the car park, you have lost nothing. At a farm charging $15 a head, the same twenty minutes costs $60 and a grudge.
U-pick apples, priced by the container. A peck is $18, a half bushel $29, a bushel $46. Those are standard dry measures rather than farm-specific units — a peck is a quarter bushel — which means the pricing rewards buying big. Two pecks cost $36 for the same fruit that $29 buys as a half bushel. If you want a lot of apples, take the larger container. If you want a bag of apples for the week, the peck is already more than most households eat.
A bushel is a serious quantity of fruit. Know what you intend to do with it before it is in the boot of the car.
The farm lists a corn maze, hayrides, farm animals and live weekend entertainment, and does not publish a price for any of it. It also gives no fall season start or end dates — the hours page runs on a May-to-October and November-to-December pattern with no year attached, which suggests evergreen text rather than a 2026 calendar.
That is not alarming for a farm that is open daily all season, but it does mean two questions get answered at the market counter rather than in advance: what the maze costs, and whether the maze and hayrides are running on the day you have chosen. Corn mazes in southern Ohio are cut into a real crop and come down when the crop and the weather are finished, so a very late visit may find the orchard open and the maze gone.
Weekday mornings are the quiet, cheap, functional version of this visit. Weekend afternoons bring the live entertainment and the crowd that comes with it. Both are legitimate; they are just different days out. The scheduling trap is Sunday, which opens at noon rather than 9am — a three-hour gap that is easy to miss on a page listing four sets of hours.
The farm lists May to October hours of Monday to Saturday 9am to 6pm and Sunday noon to 6pm, switching to a 5pm close from November. It does not stamp those hours with a year, so treat them as the usual pattern rather than a 2026 guarantee. Weekday mornings are the obvious choice: the bakery is open, the orchard is quiet, and the live entertainment that draws weekend crowds is not running. Come at a weekend if the entertainment is the point. The Sunday noon opening is the one to watch — it is three hours later than the rest of the week and easy to get wrong.
Two hours for apples, a walk and a bakery stop. Longer if you take on the corn maze, which a local roundup described as twelve acres.
Weekend afternoons carry the live entertainment and the bulk of the visitors. Being open daily rather than weekends-only spreads the load better than most farms in the region manage.
Free, according to the farm. Surface is not stated — expect gravel or grass and soft ground after autumn rain.
You want a big attraction-led festival with a wristband and a dozen rides. This is a fruit farm with fall activities attached, not an agritourism park. Skip it too if you need to know the maze and hayride prices in advance; the farm does not publish them.
Entry and parking are free. U-pick apples are charged by container — $18 a peck, $29 a half bushel, $46 a bushel — and the farm does not publish prices for the corn maze or hayrides.
Noon, against a 9am opening the rest of the week. The close is 6pm through October and 5pm from November.
Not published on the farm's own site. Assume there is a charge and ask at the market when you arrive.
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. Free parking and entry. U-pick apples priced by container: peck $18, half bushel $29, bushel $46. The farm's site does not publish a price for the corn maze or hayrides.
1640 Stubbs Mills Rd, Lebanon, OH 45036, in Warren County. It is one of 9 patches we track in Southwest Ohio.
We track 9 patches in Southwest Ohio, 2 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 a market, bakery or taproom, which most Southwest Ohio patches on our list do not.
One caveat worth repeating: this farm had not published its 2026 dates when we last checked, while 6 of the 9 patches we track in Southwest Ohio had. Treat any date you see elsewhere as last year's until the farm confirms it.
There are 5 other patches we track in Warren County. All Southwest Ohio patches →
Map pin is set to the town centre. Navigate to the street address above, not the pin.
ironsfruitfarm.org
Checked August 2026.