Free entry, free parking and everything priced a la carte, so the day costs exactly what you choose to do — but the Autumn Harvest Festival is Saturdays and Sundays only, and a weekday visit gets you the market and the famous pie and nothing else.
Festival entry and parking are free. Attractions are pay-per-ride: hayrides $7 for ages 12+, $5 for ages 3-11, free under 2; corn maze $7 with ages 2 and under free; pick-your-own apples half peck $15, peck $25, half bushel $45. Pony rides are offered but the price is not published.
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.
The Elegant Farmer is a market and bakery that runs a festival, rather than a festival farm that happens to have a shop. That ordering explains most of what is good and most of what is confusing about planning a visit.
The market is open daily, 9am to 6pm, year round. The Autumn Harvest Festival is Saturdays and Sundays only, 10am to 5pm, September 12 through October 25. Those two sets of hours sit on the same website and are easy to conflate, and the consequence of getting it wrong is arriving on a Wednesday in October to find the hayride wagon parked and the maze closed.
If you are coming for the pie, any day works. If you are coming for a family fall outing, it has to be a weekend inside those seven weeks.
Entry and parking are free. That is worth more than it sounds. It means there is no penalty for a short visit, no sunk cost pushing you to stay when a toddler has had enough, and no need to decide in advance how much farm you are going to consume. You can walk in, look at the corn maze queue, and decide.
It does not, however, mean the day is cheap once you start doing things. Hayrides are $7 for ages 12 and up and $5 for ages 3 to 11. The corn maze is $7, with under-2s free. Two adults and two primary-school children doing both attractions comes to roughly $52 — $24 on the hayride and $28 on the maze — before food, before apples, before a pie. That is not far off what a mid-tier ticketed farm charges for a family of four, and the difference is that here you can choose to spend $14 instead by doing one thing once.
The pattern worth learning: at a free-gate a la carte farm, the money leaks through repetition. Children want to ride the hayride twice. Budget for the second ride, or decide before you get in line that there will not be one.
Apples are sold by container: half peck $15, peck $25, half bushel $45. Crucially, our record gives no indication that every person entering the orchard must buy their own container. That is a different and much friendlier structure than orchards that charge per body in the rows, and it means a family can pick together against a single $25 peck rather than multiplying a bag price by four. If your household eats a lot of apples, this is where the value sits.
Two things here are genuinely distinctive rather than standard farm inventory. The first is Apple Pie Baked in a Paper Bag, the farm’s signature product, sold in the year-round market. It is the reason a lot of people drive to Mukwonago in the first place, and it does not require the festival to be running.
The second is the East Troy Electric Railroad, which runs vintage trains from a depot on the property. Tickets for that are bought through the railroad rather than the farm, so it is a separate transaction with its own schedule — check the railroad’s own timetable rather than assuming the trains run whenever the festival does.
A 5pm close on the last festival weekend in October is roughly an hour of usable daylight short of what the same 5pm gave you in mid-September. Waukesha County evenings in late October get cold quickly once the sun drops behind the tree line, and an open hayride wagon is the coldest place on any farm. Layers rather than one heavy coat, and something on the children’s hands.
Wisconsin Octobers are wet, and free parking at a busy farm usually means grass overflow. Shoes you can hose down are the sensible choice for the maze rows either way.
The Autumn Harvest Festival runs Saturdays and Sundays only, September 12 through October 25, 2026, 10am to 5pm. That is fourteen operating days across seven weekends, which concentrates demand hard. Mid-September Saturdays are the least pressured festival days; late-October weekends are the busiest and also the coldest. If the market and the bakery are what you actually want, go on a weekday — it is open daily 9am to 6pm and it will be empty.
Two to three hours for the festival. The market alone is a thirty-minute stop, and worth making on its own terms.
Fourteen days, seven weekends, a 10am to 5pm window and free entry. Free admission removes the friction that keeps casual visitors away, so the festival gets busy in a way the visitor count alone does not predict. The first hour after the 10am open is the usable quiet; by early afternoon on an October Saturday the hayride and maze lines are the constraint.
Free, per the farm's own festival page. Surface is not specified in our record. The farm sits at the junction of Highways ES and J in Waukesha County, so assume overflow onto grass on peak weekends and soft ground after October rain.
Not published. The year-round market, bakery and Smilin' Barn Cafe are on the accessible side of a visit and cost nothing to enter; the corn maze and orchard rows will be uneven ground. Since there is no gate fee, there is no financial penalty in coming to see how much of it works for you.
Your only free days are weekdays and you want the festival. The hayride, corn maze and pony rides run weekends only between September 12 and October 25; on a Tuesday you get a market and a bakery. Skip it too if you want a big-attraction farm with ziplines and shows — this is an orchard and market with a festival attached, not a fall theme park.
Schuett Farms is also in Mukwonago, a few miles north on Highway 83, and it is the complementary visit: a working dairy farm with pick-your-own pumpkins, a 12-acre corn maze and a hay ride that includes feeding the cows. Elegant Farmer does not headline a u-pick pumpkin field in our record, so pairing the two gets you apples and pie at one and pumpkins at the other. Both are free at the gate.
No. Festival entry and parking are both free. You pay per attraction: hayrides $7 for ages 12 and up and $5 for ages 3 to 11, the corn maze $7, and u-pick apples by the container from $15 for a half peck.
Saturdays and Sundays only, September 12 through October 25, 10am to 5pm. A local roundup listed a slightly different window of September 6 to October 26; we used the farm's own published dates.
No. The festival is weekends only. The farm market is open daily 9am to 6pm year round, so a weekday visit gets you the store, the bakery and the pie, but no attractions.
Not published. Pony rides are listed as an offering but no price appears in anything we read, so ask at the farm before promising a child a ride.
September 12 – October 25, 2026. Autumn Harvest Festival Saturdays and Sundays only; the farm market is open daily year-round. Hours: Harvest Festival 10:00am-5:00pm Saturdays and Sundays; farm market daily 9:00am-6:00pm.
Admission is free. Festival entry and parking are free. Attractions are pay-per-ride: hayrides $7 for ages 12+, $5 for ages 3-11, free under 2; corn maze $7 with ages 2 and under free; pick-your-own apples half peck $15, peck $25, half bushel $45. Pony rides are offered but the price is not published.
1545 Main Street (Hwys ES & J), Mukwonago, WI 53149, in Waukesha County. It is one of 7 patches we track in Milwaukee Region.
We track 7 patches in Milwaukee Region, 3 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 44 days against a regional average of 42, so it is broadly in line with the rest of the region.
There are 2 other patches we track in Waukesha County. All Milwaukee Region patches →
Map pin is set to the town centre. Navigate to the street address above, not the pin.
elegantfarmer.com · zippopotam.us
Checked August 2026.