Not an attraction at all but a roadside produce stand and nursery with a serious pumpkin selection, free to walk into, open until 7pm - the right choice when you want pumpkins and fall decor without paying for a festival.
No admission is charged; this is a produce stand and nursery, and you pay only for the pumpkins, gourds, cornstalks, mums and produce you buy. No prices are published on the site.
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.
It is worth being blunt about what this is, because the category it appears in will mislead people. Porter Farms is a produce stand and nursery. There is no gate, no ticket, no maze and no field to walk. You drive up, you look at pumpkins, you buy some, you leave.
For a large share of the people searching for a pumpkin patch in October, that is actually what they wanted.
The ticketed farms around the Triangle are good at what they do, but they solve a different problem. They sell an afternoon. If what you need is four pumpkins for the porch, two mums and a couple of cornstalks, paying $22 a head to enter a fun park is an expensive way to go shopping.
Here the entire budget goes on the goods. A family that would have spent $80 on admission elsewhere can spend it on pumpkins instead, and the selection is the selling point - many sizes and colours, ornamental gourds, cornstalks, mums, and a display of giant pumpkins that have taken state fair and farmers’ market awards.
Nine to seven, Sunday through Friday, and eight to seven on Saturday at the Raleigh site. The Willow Spring stand on NC Highway 42 goes later still, to 9pm every day.
Almost no attraction farm in North Carolina is open at 6.30 on a Tuesday evening in October. That means the pumpkin errand does not need to consume a weekend at all - it can be a stop on the way home from work, which for a household juggling October weekends is worth more than any discount.
The Willow Spring site also has an ice cream parlour, which the Raleigh stand does not. If you are choosing between them and there are children in the car, that is the deciding factor.
Two gaps in the record are worth naming. There are no published prices for anything, so you cannot compare this against another farm on cost without going. And there are no exact 2026 dates for when pumpkins arrive and when they run out - only the general September-to-October window and the hard fact that the whole business shuts from November to March.
The practical consequence of that second gap is at the end of the season. A ticketed farm advertises its closing date loudly because it sells tickets; a produce stand simply runs out. If you leave your pumpkin buying to the last days of October, you are relying on stock that has been picked over for six weeks. Go earlier, and pick from the full range - which, given that range is the reason to come here, is the whole point.
Treat it as the second stop. Take the children to a farm with a hayride and a maze in the morning, enjoy that for what it is, and buy the actual pumpkins here on the way home for what they cost rather than what a captive audience will pay. It is not a romantic plan, but it is a sensible one, and southern Wake County makes the detour short.
The business runs April to October and is closed November to March, and its site says pumpkins are available September to October. It does not publish exact 2026 pumpkin start and end dates, so the safe advice is to buy before the last week of October rather than assuming the stand will still be stocked afterwards. The Raleigh site on Ten-Ten Road is open Sunday to Friday 9am to 7pm and Saturday 8am to 7pm, which makes a weekday evening stop entirely practical - the strongest argument for coming here rather than a ticketed farm.
Twenty to forty minutes. This is a shopping stop, not an outing, and it should be treated as one.
Barely applicable. A roadside stand with twelve-hour daily opening does not concentrate demand the way a weekends-only farm does. The busiest hour will be Saturday late morning and the quietest a weekday evening, and the difference is a few minutes at the till rather than a queue.
Not published, but this is a roadside produce operation rather than a field attraction, so it is likely to be a hard-standing lot close to the stock. That also means it will not be a mud problem after autumn rain, which sets it apart from every field-parking farm on this site.
Not addressed. As a general point, a stand-and-nursery format is usually far easier for a wheelchair or a stroller than a pumpkin field, a hay wagon or a corn maze, since the stock is brought to a flat sales area rather than left in the ground. That is an inference from the format, not something the business states.
You have children expecting a day out. There is no corn maze, no hayride, no petting zoo and no field to run around in - it is a stand and a nursery. If the point of your afternoon is entertaining a five-year-old, this is not it, though it is an excellent twenty-minute stop on the way home from somewhere that is.
Ten-Ten Road runs across southern Wake County, which makes this an easy add-on to almost any trip south of Raleigh. It works particularly well as the pumpkin-buying half of a day whose other half was spent at a ticketed farm that charges heavily for its own pumpkins.
No. It is a produce stand and nursery, not a ticketed attraction. You pay only for pumpkins, gourds, cornstalks, mums and produce.
The site says September to October, without giving exact 2026 dates. The whole business closes from November through March, so late October is the practical end of the pumpkin window.
The Ten-Ten Road site in Raleigh is open Sunday to Friday 9am to 7pm and Saturday 8am to 7pm. The Willow Spring site on NC Highway 42 opens earlier and closes at 9pm every day, and it is the one with the ice cream parlour.
No. There are no attractions of that kind. The draw is the pumpkin and fall decor selection, plus a display of award-winning giant pumpkins.
2026 dates had not been published when we last checked. In past seasons it has run: Sunday-Friday and Saturday (Ten-Ten Road site); the farm is open April-October and closed November-March. Check with the farm before driving out.
Admission is free. No admission is charged; this is a produce stand and nursery, and you pay only for the pumpkins, gourds, cornstalks, mums and produce you buy. No prices are published on the site.
7615 Ten-Ten Road, Raleigh, NC 27603, in Wake County. It is one of 5 patches we track in Research Triangle.
We track 5 patches in Research Triangle, 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.
One caveat worth repeating: this farm had not published its 2026 dates when we last checked, while 3 of the 5 patches we track in Research Triangle had. Treat any date you see elsewhere as last year's until the farm confirms it.
There is 1 other patch we track in Wake County. All Research Triangle patches →
Map pin is set to the town centre. Navigate to the street address above, not the pin.
porterfarmsandnursery.com
Checked August 2026.