As the sky turned orange on the evening of Oct. 4, visitors to Spina Farms Pumpkin Patch lined up to pose in front of a screaming animatronic creature lurching out of the corn, while others spread out among rows of pumpkins staged for photos.
The scene is by design. The patch, at Laguna Avenue and Santa Teresa Boulevard in north Morgan Hill, has become as much a social media backdrop as a place to pick a pumpkin, and its owner says that’s what put it on the map.
“With TikTok and Instagram and every other platform,” Gary Tognetti said, the farm has become better known for its seasonal pumpkin patch than for the vegetables it grows year-round.
Don, 20, of Colorado, said TikTok is what brought him to the patch. “It looks even better in person,” he said, adding that the lighting environment was “very nice” for social media photos.
Mika, 23, of Livermore, said she hadn’t seen anything like it, even online.
“The colors, the light, and there are so many attractions, too,” she said. “And there are so many families.”
Tognetti said the patch draws 15,000-20,000 people on its busiest days, though a recent heat wave has suppressed attendance below that of a year ago.
The patch grows 108 varieties of pumpkins on 60 acres, Tognetti said. It opens as early as mid-September and is staffed by about 350 employees, almost all of them students, for roughly 45 days. Tognetti said that’s about as long as the corn stalks and flowers that frame the park stay at their peak. Preparation takes about six weeks, and planting begins in June.
The farm’s main business is year-round. Spina Farms grows peppers, tomatoes, corn, lettuce and broccoli on 4,000 acres and employs 600-800 people in its farming operation, Tognetti said, with the 60 acres for the pumpkin patch being a small fraction of their operation.
The park’s signature attraction is its dinosaurs, which Tognetti said began with a rusted metal T. rex purchased on a whim from a nursery where he and his office manager had gone to rent trees.
“We went to Moon’s Nursery to rent some big boxed trees for shade,” he said. “They had this metal T. rex, just a rusted old thing. And we said, well, ‘let’s see if they let us put that out there.’”
Before long, Tognetti started noticing the dinosaur was attracting lines of parents photographing their kids with the metal beast, and he decided to double down on the theme. He ordered animatronic dinosaurs from a company in China. Godzilla followed two years ago, then King Kong.
The park now has 50-60 animatronic figures, Tognetti said, and this year he added four dragons and a second screaming creature after seeing how many people lined up for the first. He also added a fourth train and a second hayride to ease the pressure of growing lines for attractions.
Small, remote-controlled robot dinosaurs also walk the grounds, jumping, dancing and giving high fives.
The farm’s history goes back more than 80 years. The Spina family opened a small pumpkin patch in the 1940s, off Bailey Avenue and Santa Teresa Boulevard. Tognetti and his family took over in 2019 before moving the pumpkin patch to one of their other farms.
The current site is on farmland protected by the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority, which the patch’s website lists as a partner and which has a booth at the park, Tognetti said.
“They’re for saving farmland,” he said. “We’re basically ag entertainment—we’re showing the beauty of the farm out there. We’re with them in saving ag land because we’re farmers, we love what they do and they love what we do, so it’s been a good relationship.”
The business carries risk, he said. Rain can close the patch and cost the farm money.
“So far, we’ve been fortunate,” he said. “If it rained for two or three weekends, which it does sometimes, we’d lose money on the pumpkin patch.”
For him, the payoff is watching families.
“I’ll just sit on a hay bale and watch the kids, and the interactions, the excitement,” he said. “It’s just a neat thing for me to be able to know that we built that, and so many people are able to bring their kids and enjoy it as a family.”
