Sunday, August 16, 2009

Underwood Farms

We go to my sister’s house in Chatsworth fairly often. It’s about 45 minutes to an hour on the 118 depending on the traffic. More often than not we stop at the Underwood Farms produce stand and buy strawberries and other produce that’s in season. It’s locally grown (as far as I know) and much better quality than the stuff you get at the big chain supermarkets. They also have a small playground and some farm animals in pens to the side. If we have the time we’ll buy a small bag of carrots for a dollar and feed the animals. They have a few pigmy goats, a couple regular sized goats of different breeds, a llama and some chickens.

The pigmy goats have a series of wooden platforms and ramps that they rest on during the day. When they see people coming with carrots they scuttle down the ramps to get their share. Around the corner are more goats and the llama. They know where the carrots come from too, and crowd around the fence. One of the goats (the white one under the red sign) has learned to rattle the fence with his hoof if you don’t pay attention to him. There’s also a big one with floppy ears that peers over the fence to get his carrots – Deane thinks that one’s a bit scary.

Underwood also has a large farm near Moorpark. They hold a variety of events there, the biggest being the Fall Harvest Festival. The festival runs from the end of September to the end of October. We went there last year and had a good time. It’s a low key event, with a lot of farm animals (and small bags of carrots) as well as rides for the kids. One of their biggest attractions is their pumpkins. The Fall Harvest Festival has acres and acres of pumpkins. Huge pumpkins, small pumpkins (I think they’re actually gourds), white pumpkins, round pumpkins, splotchy orange pumpkins – more types of pumpkins than I knew existed. We had already bought some big pumpkins at the store. With all those pumpkins, we felt obligated to buy something so we bought a couple small ones. One started getting moldy last April and the other we just threw out last week – we got our money’s worth from them. The next one starts on the 26th of September and we’ll probably go again this year.

No comments:

Post a Comment