10/03/2023
Hello!! We have had quite a few new people who haven’t been around the entire time for Harlyn’s Gourds, so we figured we would reintroduce ourselves again!!! Our trailer sits at 602 South College Ave Aledo, IL 61231 for those who are looking!
The girl behind Harlyn’s Gourds is 4 year old Harlyn Fobert! We have our huge patch at our family farm in rural Aledo. She helps us disc the field, plant, transplant, water, w**d, pick, sort and take money. Every gourd is touched by her at some point. All of the money we earn goes to her for her future!
When Papa Zippy found out he was going to have a grandkid, he told us he wanted to do a pumpkin patch for them. The first year, we got a few gourds and pumpkins with a couple ears of Indian corn. The 2nd year, we moved it to another spot. The gourd patch took off, and we were left with 100s of gourds and a few pumpkins. We decided to start selling them at the Farmer’s Market and to a few stores. We are now on our 5th year, and the patch is bigger than ever! We are picking 1000s of gourds and lots of pumpkins! The last few years we have had a few acres of Indian Corn that is absolutely beautiful! This is our first year we couldn’t get our Indian Corn and some pumpkins to grow with not getting much rain! We are just now starting to have the rest of our first picking getting done! We have 100s of more gourds coming to the trailer.
This year we planted 850 pumpkin seeds and 1200 gourd seeds with hundreds of volunteer plants popping up.
In the past 5 years, we have grown the patch tremendously, had all kinds of pop up shops, grown thousands of gourds and hundreds of pumpkins, taught Harlyn so much about having a small business, sold to Hyvee and was spotlighted on Paula Sands Live, set up shop at many Aledo Farmer’s Markets, set up shop at the Sherrard Pumpkin Fest, and made so many new friends! Harlyn’s biggest accomplishment was buying a secondhand trailer to set up shop on South College Ave in Aledo! This is where we do most of our sales now, but we still do pop up shops and hoping to do a vendor fair here soon. We welcomed in Harlyn’s brother, Huxton, last Christmas to the family, and he has kept us busy this year. We were planning on adding in some new items this year, but we had our hands extra full getting Huxton all of his medical needs this year! Next year, we are going to have some fun!!
We are planning on getting out to the patch this week to pick! It got a little too hot to be out there ! Plus we wanted everything to grow a little more!!
Hope to see you all at the trailer!! Thank you so much for everyone who has stopped by! If we are home, we try to send Harlyn out to help you out.
