Free admission and $10 parking make this the lowest-risk October outing in the Tampa area — right up until you total the wristbands, pumpkins and camel rides, at which point a family of four is spending like a ticketed festival anyway.
Free admission, no tickets required; $10 parking per car. Hayride wristbands are $5 and good all day. From the 2025 season: pumpkins $8 each with painting included, goat feed $5 per cup, camel rides $15, fall tasting flight $25.
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.
Keel Farms takes the opposite approach to most Florida fall festivals. Rather than charging $20 a head at the gate and folding the attractions in, it lets you walk on for nothing, charges $10 to park the car, and then prices everything individually. Whether that is cheaper depends entirely on your family.
For a couple with one toddler who might melt down in half an hour, it is dramatically cheaper — you are out $10 and a coffee if the visit fails. For four people who want to ride, paint a pumpkin each and feed the goats, the total lands within a few dollars of a ticketed farm, just distributed across a dozen small transactions instead of one.
Working from the 2025 add-on prices, which the farm had not restated for 2026 when we checked: parking $10, hayride wristbands $5 per person and good all day, pumpkins $8 each with painting included, goat feed $5 a cup, camel rides $15, and a fall tasting flight $25 for the adults.
A family of four doing the obvious things — park, four wristbands, four pumpkins — is at $62 before anyone eats. Add two camel rides and you are past $90. Add lunch from the food trucks and a tasting flight and the day looks nothing like “free admission.”
None of this is a criticism; it is a pricing model, and an honest one. But the number to budget against is $60 to $100, not $10.
Harvest Days runs 10am to 3pm on Saturdays and Sundays through October. That is a short window, and it is positioned badly against the Florida climate — you get the late morning and the peak afternoon heat, not the cool evening. Arrive at opening. The corn maze, the bounce houses and the play areas are all considerably less appealing at 1pm than at 10:15am, and the crowd will have arrived by then too.
The one structural advantage of the early close is that the winery and restaurant stay open past it. The intended shape of the day is clearly kids’ festival in the morning, then a sit-down meal and a drink once the field portion shuts. That works well for mixed-age groups and is genuinely better than the usual “drive home hot and hungry” ending.
The activity list is long and unusually varied: corn maze, hayrides, goat feeding, camel rides, a pumpkin pie eating contest, yard games, live music, bounce houses, a playground, vendors and food trucks. Camel rides in particular are a real novelty and the thing kids will remember, at $15 a head in 2025.
The pumpkins, as at every patch in Florida, were trucked in — the state’s climate rules out a commercial fall crop, so no farm here grows its own October pumpkins regardless of what the photos suggest. Keel’s are $8 with painting included, which is a fair bundle rather than a markup.
What you are really buying is a well-run five-hour festival attached to a working winery, at a price you control. Decide your add-on budget in the parking lot, not at the camel line.
At 10am when Harvest Days opens. The festival window is only 10am to 3pm on Saturdays and Sundays, which puts the entire thing inside the hottest stretch of a Florida October day — the first ninety minutes are the only comfortable ones. Early October Saturdays will be busier than the last weekend of the month at a free-entry farm, because free entry draws walk-ups all season rather than concentrating demand on Halloween.
Two to three hours for the festival itself, and it cannot be much more — it closes at 3pm. Adults who want the winery side should plan a fourth hour after the kids' portion ends, since the tasting room and restaurant stay open well past the festival.
Free entry means no ticketing friction and no way to gauge demand in advance. October Saturdays midday are the obvious crush; Sunday mornings should be lighter. The five-hour window concentrates everyone into a narrow band, so the difference between a 10am and a noon arrival is larger here than at a farm open eight hours.
$10 per car, and it is the only mandatory cost of the day. That is the right way to price a free-entry farm, and it also means carpooling is a real saving rather than a rounding error. Assume field parking and soft ground after rain, as at nearly every Florida farm.
The property mixes a permanent winery and restaurant building with outdoor festival grounds, so surfaces will vary between the two. The farm has not published accessibility details we can quote — worth a call ahead if that matters to your group.
You want a long day. The festival runs five hours and the play list is broad rather than deep — a family used to full-day agritourism parks will feel it wind down. Skip it too if you are trying to keep the day under $30 with three kids in tow, because the à la carte model punishes larger groups.
Plant City sits between Tampa and Lakeland just off I-4, so this pairs naturally with a drive rather than a second patch. Given the festival ends at 3pm and the restaurant does not, the intended pairing is on-site: kids' activities in the morning, a long lunch after.
Admission is free and no tickets are required, but parking is $10 per car and essentially every activity beyond walking around is priced individually. Plan on $10 minimum and considerably more if the kids ride and paint.
Using 2025 add-on prices as a guide: $10 parking, four $5 hayride wristbands and four $8 pumpkins with painting comes to $62 before food. Add camel rides at $15 each and it climbs fast. The headline free admission is real, but it is not the number to budget against.
Yes — it is a working winery with a restaurant, and seasonal wines and ciders are part of the draw. A fall tasting flight was $25 in 2025. The winery and restaurant keep longer hours than the 10am-3pm festival.
October 3 – October 31, 2026. Every Saturday and Sunday in October. Hours: 10am-3pm (the winery and restaurant stay open later: Mon-Thu 11am-9pm, Fri-Sat 11am-10pm, Sun 11am-7pm).
Admission is free. Free admission, no tickets required; $10 parking per car. Hayride wristbands are $5 and good all day. From the 2025 season: pumpkins $8 each with painting included, goat feed $5 per cup, camel rides $15, fall tasting flight $25.
5202 Thonotosassa Road, Plant City, FL 33565, in Hillsborough County. It is one of 11 patches we track in Tampa Bay.
We track 11 patches in Tampa Bay, 4 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.
Its season runs about 29 days against a regional average of 34, so it is broadly in line with the rest of the region.
What sets it apart locally: it has a market, bakery or taproom, which most Tampa Bay patches on our list do not.
There are 8 other patches we track in Hillsborough County. All Tampa Bay patches →
keelfarms.com · tampabaydatenightguide.com · fun4tampakids.com
Checked August 2026.