October abounds with fall harvest festivals in the Portland area. Families seeking their Halloween pumpkins and an escape into the countryside stream out of the city to regional farms. Beyond pumpkins, festival goers often enjoy picnic food, live music, corn mazes (and occasionally sunflower mazes!), hayrides, and farm animals.
Yet with so many fall festivals around, how to choose? In today’s post, I’ll share why I recommend the Topaz Farm Fall Harvest Festival on Sauvie Island for any Portlander looking to celebrate the changing seasons. Prefer to start with a video tour? Check out our Topaz Farm highlights video below.
Topaz Farm Fall Harvest Festival in a Nutshell
Topaz Farm feels like a peaceful escape, but it’s actually just 20 minutes’ drive from downtown Portland. It’s on Sauvie Island at Portland’s northwest edge, which is the Columbia River’s largest island. A plethora of farms share Sauvie Island with a huge wildlife refuge that’s a sanctuary for birds.
In October, the grounds at Topaz Farm are filled with a buzz of happy chatter. Children race across the lawns. String lights twinkle under huge tents filled with picnickers. The telltale scents of festival food waft over from the grill, where a growing line of hungry festival goers gather. Free-range chickens wander among the visitors, on the lookout for dropped food.
A covered market sells produce from the farm and local wares from around Oregon. From fresh heirloom tomatoes to Oregon olive oil or hazelnut spread, foodies will find delectable treats. Outside the market, pumpkins and other gourds are stacked by type in huge boxes. There’s everything from traditional big orange pumpkins destined for jack-o-lantern carving, to gnarled gourds with bubbly skin, to green fairytale pumpkins, fresh pie pumpkins, and those miniature pumpkins that often appear in storefront displays.
It’s Halloween tradition in our house to carve a Harry Potter-themed jack-o-lantern, so Bryan and I carefully inspected the larger pumpkins while debating which character would star in this year’s masterpiece. Last year was Harry and the year before was Hagrid, but this year’s remains undecided. We did agree on a tall pumpkin with a flat, oval face—lots of surface area to bring it to life! Let us know in the comments which character you think would be best.
Beyond the pumpkins and picnickers, we wandered over to the animals. A fabulously enormous pig snacked on a pumpkin rind. There were goats and donkeys, and even a small cow.
A row of bright pink cosmos flowers was in full bloom at the edge of the festivities, honeybees buzzing among them.
We followed the rows of crops to a sunflower patch. A sign posted at the sunflower patch read something along the lines of “These sunflowers are past their prime. Turn right and then take another right at the donkeys to find the sunflower maze that’s still blooming!”
Intrigued, we did just that. If you’d prefer to use a map rather than navigate by donkey, check out this map of Topaz Farm. We didn’t see any maps on site, so I’d recommend having the link handy on your phone when you go.
On our way to the sunflower maze via the donkeys, we caught sight of a huge old oak tree. The Topaz Farm website estimates the tree is over 400 years old. It’s humbling to imagine how much has changed in its lifetime.
We’d never done a sunflower maze before, so we were excited to check it out. The sunflower maze is a fabulous place for photos, with 4 acres of sunflowers idyllically framed by low foothills in the distance. As we wandered among the sunflowers, a huge flock of migrating geese flew overhead in a complicated V formation, their calls filling the air. If anything could have made our day at the farm more perfectly capture fall, this was it.
The sunflower maze isn’t open the whole harvest festival season since the sunflowers will start to fade. If you’d like to see them (and I’d highly recommend it!), go early in the season and check the farm website for bloom updates. If you miss the sunflowers or are ready for more maze action after wandering among the flowers, check out the corn mazes. In 2022, there were two corn mazes, one on either side of the sunflower maze.
Tickets and Parking for the Topaz Farm Fall Harvest Festival
Beginning in 2022, visiting the farm on weekend days and some school holidays requires booking tickets in advance (at $20/vehicle). The positive side of this: with your reservation, you’re not likely to have trouble finding parking when you go. Check the farm website for the latest on tickets and reservations if you go in a later year.
Other Adventures in the Pacific Northwest
If you enjoy the Topaz Farm Fall Festival, you may also enjoy our collection of other quirky and delightful regional festivals and events.
For more travel ideas in the Pacific Northwest, check out our PNW Trip Planner. You can find adventures near you and filter by season and difficulty level. There are weird and wonderful things to explore any time of year. The trip planner links to blog posts to help you plan your next adventure.
Happy exploring!
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