A free-entry working fruit farm in Gaston County that adds pumpkins and hay rides in autumn rather than running a ticketed festival - low risk, long daily hours, and the only real trap is a noon opening on Sundays.
The farm states 'Admission is always free.' Pumpkins, hay rides and produce are paid separately; Charlotte On The Cheap reported a $7.50 wagon ride that included a pumpkin in the prior (2025) season.
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.
There are two kinds of pumpkin operation in the Carolinas. One is an event: a gate, a ticket, forty attractions, a price that scales with your family size. The other is a farm that happens to grow pumpkins and lets you come and buy them. Lineberger’s is firmly the second kind, and the site says so as clearly as a farm can - admission is always free.
That single line changes the calculation more than anything else on the record. A free farm is not competing with a ticketed one; it is competing with the supermarket, and it wins that comparison easily.
The value is not the money saved, it is the risk removed. Anyone who has paid $80 for a family of four to enter a fall festival and then watched a three-year-old melt down at the eleven-minute mark knows what the sunk cost does to the rest of the afternoon. Here there is no sunk cost. You can arrive, spend twenty minutes, buy a pumpkin and leave, and the day has cost you a pumpkin.
It also makes repeat visits sensible. If you live in Gaston County you can come three times in October - once for pumpkins, once because the weather turned nice, once for muscadines - and never think about the price of entry.
The farm opens at 9am six days a week and at noon on Sunday. That is a three-hour difference and it is the most likely way to waste a trip here. Sunday after church, before lunch, is exactly the slot a lot of families would pick for a farm visit, and it does not exist.
The other end of the schedule is more generous than most. A 6:30pm weekday close is genuinely late for a farm, which makes an after-school or after-work stop workable through early October before the light goes.
The record has no pumpkin-season start. The posted hours run through October 31 and stop, which gives a firm end but leaves the beginning open. Practically, this is a working pick-your-own fruit farm that adds pumpkins in autumn, so the site is open regardless - but whether the patch is stocked in mid-September is a question only the farm can answer.
If you are driving any distance for pumpkins specifically rather than for produce, that is a call worth making. It is also the one gap on this page that a five-minute phone call closes completely.
Pumpkins, hay rides, pick-your-own fruit, playgrounds, a hay bale mountain, chickens to feed, a farm store and picnic shelters. That is the honest inventory, and it suits a young family well. What it does not include is a corn maze, rides, or anything built for a teenager, and it would be misleading to pitch this as a half-day out.
Picnic shelters are worth noting, though. A free farm with somewhere to sit and eat your own food is a rare and useful combination, and it is the cheapest good autumn afternoon in this part of the state.
The farm has not published a pumpkin-season opening date, so the honest answer is that we do not know when the patch itself goes in. What is published is the seasonal schedule: Monday to Friday 9am to 6:30pm, Saturday 9am to 6pm, Sunday noon to 6pm, running through October 31. After that the farm comes off its seasonal hours, so the last week of October is effectively the end of the fall window. A weekday morning is the best version of this visit - long hours, no gate, and Gaston County traffic that is nothing like the Charlotte metro's.
An hour to ninety minutes for most families. This is a farm stop, not a day out - pumpkins, a hay ride, the playgrounds and hay bale mountain, chickens to feed, then the farm store.
Free entry plus long daily hours means the crowd is spread thinner than at a ticketed farm, and Gaston County does not generate the weekend demand that Mecklenburg does. October Saturdays will still be the busiest, and the noon Sunday opening pushes everyone who wanted a Sunday visit into a six-hour window.
Not published. This is a working pick-your-own farm on the Dallas Stanley Highway, so expect a farm lot rather than a paved one, and expect it to be soft for a few days after heavy rain - which in late September and early October in the Carolinas usually means the remains of a tropical system.
Not addressed anywhere the farm publishes. A pumpkin field, a hay bale mountain and a wagon ride are all uneven or stepped by nature; the farm store and picnic shelters are likely to be more manageable. Call 704-922-8688 if it matters.
You want a corn maze, a haunted attraction or a pay-one-price fun park. There is none of that here. Skip Sunday morning specifically, because the farm does not open until noon.
Dallas is in Gaston County west of Charlotte, comfortably closer for anyone on the Gastonia side of the metro than the big ticketed operations north of the city. If you want a free morning stop and a paid afternoon attraction on the same day, this is the free half.
Yes. The farm states that admission is always free. You pay only for pumpkins, hay rides, produce and anything from the farm store.
The farm does not publish a pumpkin-season opening date, so we cannot give one. Its posted seasonal hours run through October 31, which sets the end of the window but not the start. Call ahead in September if you need to be sure the patch is in.
Noon. Monday to Friday it opens at 9am and closes at 6:30pm, Saturday is 9am to 6pm, and Sunday is noon to 6pm. The late Sunday start is the most common scheduling surprise here.
Same family, different site. The Dallas location, Maple Springs Farm, is the one open in autumn. Berry Hill Farm in Iron Station closes after the summer berry season.
2026 dates had not been published when we last checked. In past seasons it has run: Monday-Sunday. Check with the farm before driving out.
Admission is free. The farm states 'Admission is always free.' Pumpkins, hay rides and produce are paid separately; Charlotte On The Cheap reported a $7.50 wagon ride that included a pumpkin in the prior (2025) season.
906 Dallas Stanley Highway, Dallas, NC 28034, in Gaston County. It is one of 5 patches we track in Charlotte Region.
We track 5 patches in Charlotte Region, 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 u-pick fields, which most Charlotte Region patches on our list do not.
One caveat worth repeating: this farm had not published its 2026 dates when we last checked, while 4 of the 5 patches we track in Charlotte Region had. Treat any date you see elsewhere as last year's until the farm confirms it.
Map pin is set to the town centre. Navigate to the street address above, not the pin.
linebergersfarm.com
Checked August 2026.