Ten years ago, when she was pregnant with her first child, Lisa Schaefers decided she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom.
She quit her job as a teacher's aide at Mayflower Elementary School and, with her family, began managing the 400-acre farm where she was raised.
The operation bloomed into Schaefers and Collins Farm, probably most well-known for its pumpkin patches, but also for producing a variety of other crops.
"Corn, tomatoes, peas, beans, potatoes, all your fresh stuff we raise in the spring, and we sell it here," she said.
The transition to farm life was easy for Schaefers who turned 40 on Saturday.
"Being raised on a farm, I was kind of accustomed to it," she said. "Then I went to Arkansas Tech [in Russellville] and majored in horticulture. That was the icing on the cake."
Today, the Mayflower farm caters to families with swings, a slide, tunnels made of hay, wooden cutouts of farmers, ghosts and tractors for kids to stick their heads into and have their pictures made; and pens full of adorable farm animals like goats, piglets, bunnies, ducks and chickens, and one full-sized donkey.
Sometimes a lucky, and perhaps persistent, child will leave with one of the critters.
"The animals are strictly for the month of October, for the kids. A lot of the kids will come through and talk mom or dad into [buying one] saying, 'Can I have a duck or a rabbit?'" she said.
"There's a lot of kids that would never come in contact with an animal like that."
On a recent Thursday morning, Schaefers and her father took three tractor-pulled trailers full of schoolchildren and parents to pick the pumpkin of their choice right off the vine in one of the farm's 30 acres of patches.
(Ironically, the variety of pumpkin grown in the patch especially for children is called School Time, as Schaefers' father, Wendell Collins, pointed out. "It's a variety that's hard to bust," he said, laughing.)
Entertaining children and growing pumpkins keeps Schaefers busy from March to October.
She is up at 5 a.m. every day, seven days a week, and spends all day planting, spraying and maintaining the crops, while her husband heads to his job at Hendrix College in Conway.
"Usually we don't get home until around 9:30, so we've got two kids, a 10-year-old and a 2-year-old, and by the time we got homework done, supper ready, baths, we're up till about 11:30 every night," she said.
Once the October pumpkin craze is over, Schaefers can rest from November to March.
In the winter, "we'll get the rest of the beans out, wheat planted, and all we do is tend to the cattle and hunt or fish," she said.
This year's harvest has been surprisingly good. Schaefers said she heard other pumpkin patches were reporting shortages, but "this has really been the best year we've had in quite a while."
One of the larger pumpkin varieties, called a Prize-Winner, did especially well.
"The biggest one of those we had this year was 175 pounds," she said.
But as the growing season comes to a close, Collins says he's just about pumpkin-ed out. He doesn't particularly enjoy carving jack-o'-lanterns, and he and Schaefers don't cook much of the pumpkin crop themselves but do have a few tips for the pumpkin-eaters.
"The tan ones are the best for pie, the white ones are good for soup," Schaefers said.
She also makes a dip with canned pumpkin, Cool Whip and cream cheese.
"But most people make cookies, pumpkin bread, and pie, of course," she said.
This year, Schaefers tried her hand at fundraising for the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation.
"My mom is recovering from breast cancer : and if we can raise the money, that's one person saved," she said.
The farm held a silent auction and charged the adults $1 for hayrides.
"All of the money from that went to the foundation," she said. "We raised right around $2,000 for them in one day."
She's also planning fundraisers for Arkansas Children's Hospital and starting Komen events earlier in the year.
"It's gonna be a tradition here from now on," she said.