A plethora of pumpkins can be found at Carmichael’s Pumpkin Patch in Bixby.
A curious goat stands in the petting zoo at Carmichael’s Pumpkin Patch in Bixby.
A worker at Carmichael’s Pumpkin Patch in Bixby leads visitors on their camel ride.
Davy and Bo Beless guide their wagons through the pumpkin patch at Carmichael’s Pumpkin Patch in Bixby.
Guests roam Carmichael’s Pumpkin Patch in Bixby.
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The rich farmlands around Bixby are famous for producing an array of vegetables, fruits and nuts, but there are a few things that are a little tricky to grow, even here.
One is pumpkins. The other is camels.
“It’s not impossible to grow pumpkins here in Oklahoma,” said Steve Carmichael, whose family has run Carmichael’s Produce in Bixby for the past 46 years. “But it isn’t easy. They like a cooler climate. Oklahoma is usually too hot, and things just burn up, or it’s too wet and they start to rot.
“We’ve managed to grow some in the past, but we always have to import pumpkins this time of year,” he said.
That’s because the start of the fall season is when Carmichael’s Produce sets up the Carmichael Pumpkin Patch, a harvest season celebration that offers all sorts of family-friendly, farm-related activities.
Carmichael said the idea for the pumpkin patch “just sort of developed. My parents opened the store (at 14800 S. Memorial Drive) in 1976, and that year, you couldn’t hardly find pumpkins anywhere.
“I was in kindergarten, and my teacher asked if my family had pumpkins,” he recalled. “We didn’t, but we knew a guy who did, so we started having pumpkins.”
As time went on, the family would create a pen to hold some of the goats the family raised, “because my sister was in the Brownies at the time, and some of the kids in her troop had never seen a goat before, and we thought we’d give them that opportunity,” Carmichael said.
