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One of our favorite traditions at Fresh Acres Fall Festival in Monticello, Minnesota is our annual Decorated Hay Bale Contest. Each fall, we invite five local nonprofit and community organizations to transform an ordinary round hay bale into something completely their own. Over the years, those bales have become tractors, firetrucks, hot air balloons, butterflies, a unicorn, a combine, and even The Nightmare Before Christmas. But the contest is about much more than decorating

It’s fall in Minnesota, and you are about to head out to a corn maze, pumpkin patch, or sunflower field. But what should you wear?! After eight years of working the ticket stand at Fresh Acres in Monticello, I have seen a lot when it comes to clothing — what has worked, what hasn’t, and what people have wished they had brought along the way. This time of year is unpredictable here in Minnesota. You can check the forecast, you can make a plan, but the reality can be very diffe

Customers frequently ask us, “How do you plant your corn maze?” Many people assume we plant a cornfield and spend weeks cutting the maze by hand. While that certainly can be done, it is not how we create our maze at Fresh Acres. Each year we partner with MazePlay, a company that specializes in designing and creating corn mazes. Once we have chosen the theme for the year, we send them the dimensions of our field, and they use specialized software to design a custom maze

One of the questions we get asked every year is, "How do you decide what your corn maze will look like?" The answer starts with choosing a theme. When we started Fresh Acres in 2018, we decided we wanted each year's maze to tell a story. Rather than choosing random themes, we made the decision to celebrate an important anniversary each year. It gives each maze a purpose, makes every season unique, and gives our guests something new to discover when they visit. Some years, c