Sweet Pickin's Pumpkin Patch has been around longer than most of its guests.

The center of fall festivities is celebrating its 20th anniversary this season.

Owners Deb and Terry DeVries continue to find new ways to make the experience sweeter every autumn.

“It’s just such a great community,” said Deb. “They keep supporting us, and they’re happy when we do something new.”

For two decades, the owners have found new ways to reinvent the pumpkin patch.

Their operation started small, at a 5-acre property on Kingfisher Lane to the west of Columbia Falls Stage Road. There the DeVrieses ran a limited, but popular iteration of Sweet Pickin's, with a pumpkin patch and buildings for children to play in.

“It was a lot more compact,” Deb recalled.

Three years ago, they finally expanded to a 40-acre farm on Holt Stage Road.

The biggest change, according to Deb, was increasing parking to accommodate the increasing number of visitors.

Deb said Sweet Pickin's regularly sees a few hundred visitors in a day, and that number is only going up.

This year, she’s noticed the impact of the valley’s population growth at the pumpkin patch. She remembered a time when all of the calls she received about visits came from local numbers. Now, she said, she picks up out-of-town calls every day.

School groups and families regularly make the long drive from all across Montana. Sweet Pickin's gets visits from children in Browning, Polson, Missoula and even Great Falls.

“It’s sweet,” Deb said about the farm’s widespread popularity.

STROLLING AROUND the 40-acre grounds, it’s easy to see why children are so eager to spend a day at the farm.

Paradoxically, the DeVrieses don’t offer a traditional pumpkin patch where guests select their own pumpkin right off the vine. Deb explained Montana’s chilly fall weather means it’s necessary to pick most of the pumpkins before guests are ready to start celebrating the season.

“We had 12 inches of snow on the ground this time last year,” Deb pointed out.

Instead of offering the usual pumpkin picking experience, Sweet Pickin's puts pumpkins in centralized corrals for guests to sort through.

It can be a bit of a surprise, Deb acknowledged, particularly for the new guests who recently moved from other places.

“If you’re from California, Washington or Oregon, it’s not like that,” Deb explained.

But Sweet Pickin's more than makes up for that difference with many other activities on the farm.

Probably the most popular attraction is a set of massive trampoline pillows that guests of all ages can bounce around on until they’ve completely forgotten the autumn chill in the air.

Deb said children also love their sandbox full of metal diggers, the two tricycle riding areas and rides in carts painted to look like bees and cows.

“This is my favorite thing to do because I love to ride in the dirt,” exclaimed Fynnlen Stys as he pedaled a heavy-duty tricycle through a collection of hay barrels.

His buddy, Aspen Smith, agreed. “This is my favorite thing because they go fast,” Smith said.

For visitors who want to go at a slower speed, there are plenty of other options. Children can explore miniature buildings built to be just the right size for them, like the “Old Pumpkin County Bridge.” Or they can feed animals in the petting zoo and take a loop through a small corn maze.

“It’s geared a little to a younger crowd,” Deb explained. She likes the fact that the facility offers activities for the youngest possible guests. Older kids, she said, have a lot of other activity options elsewhere in the Flathead. “It’s nice the valley has some things to offer, that variety,” she noted.

The DeVrieses are already thinking about what else they can offer in the coming seasons.

The main attraction they hope to bring in next year will be a fully functional small train. It’s coming from Wisconsin, and they plan to build a three-quarter-mile track for it around their property.

They’ve been working on getting the train up and running since they moved to Holt Stage Road.

“It’s huge,” Deb gushed.

And it will be a huge change to the farm overall, which was only a bare field when the DeVrieses moved in three years ago. But they continue sowing more seeds of innovation for the foreseeable future.

“Twenty years changes a lot,” Deb said. But through all those seasons, one thing that hasn’t changed is the family’s commitment to growing the farm.

Reporter Bret Anne Serbin may be reached at 406-758-4459 or bserbin@dailyinterlake.com.