Lake Co. Farm Hosts Drive-Through Christmas Display
Published: Friday, December 24, 2021
Some farmers add cash-and-carry dairy stores to their operations. Others sell their own beef or pork directly to customers. And, of course, any number of them are purveyors of fresh produce from stands set up by the side of the road.
To be sure, Harvest Tyme Family Farm also grows stuff that visitors buy.
However, what the 45-acre operation trades in most of all is joy especially this time of year.
Josh and Melissa Sickinger have turned a corner of their Lake County property into a sparkly, drive-through Christmas card called Harvest Time Lights. Just about every holiday theme imaginable—from the Nativity to "Frozen" to candy cane lane to Santa Claus—is represented and more than a million lights provide the glitter.
The hoop houses on this farm aren't used to protect plants from bad weather; they are sensory-immersion tunnels bathing carloads of revelers in festive purple and ice-blue hues.
For the Sickingers and their two young sons, Henry, 7, and Conrad, 5, these fields of lights also make up a field of dreams 14 years in the making.
Josh, a jolly figure in his own right, gave up his career as a certified public accountant in June to devote all of his work hours to agritainment. Nothing compares, as far as he's concerned, to giving his community of Lowell and visitors from far and wide something to ooh and aah about.
"It's the best job ever," Josh said last Thursday evening as vehicles began to meander the half-mile through lighted meadows. "I can honestly say, accounting was no fun for me and what better job can there be than to provide an experience like this, especially in an area that isn't like Chicago where there's a bunch of different kinds of attractions?
"In Northwest Indiana, those things are far and few between. So families coming out and spending quality time together like this, close to home, is priceless."
Harvest Tyme has been a place for something to do since its inception. The Sickingers added the Christmas component a year ago when people cooped up by pandemic restrictions were desperate for safe, socially distanced, outdoor diversions.
The attraction proved to be an instant hit with tickets selling out on a regular basis from the day after Thanksgiving to Jan. 30 (admission is $25 per car; Harvest Tyme Lights is closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day).
"People really enjoyed it," Josh said.
Christmas-land was the long-planned next step for the current agricultural endeavor that started out as a humble, U-pick pumpkin patch with a folding table, a tent and maybe 100 customers near Lowell.
The sixth-generation family farming operation actually began in the area as a cattle and horse operation in the 1850s. The land where Harvest Tyme is located was acquired about the time of the Civil War and cultivated by family members until 1958 when Josh's great uncle, Murray Turner, decided to quit farming and work in a steel mill to the north.
Josh's grandmother retained ownership of half of the property, which was farmed during the intervening years on a cash-lease arrangement.
"By the time I got into the equation, the most we ever did out here was come out for target practice," Josh said. "The land was alternated between corn and beans but the whole front part, that was the homestead, was all overgrown with vegetation. There was no electric service, well, or anything.
"We started from square one, having to build up all the infrastructure to bring it to where it is today."
In a time when precious farmland is continually lost to commercial interests, Josh and Melissa, who teaches English at Hebron High School, went in an opposite direction in 2006.
"Obviously, we were two generations out from actually having farmed and I didn't go school for agriculture, but I wanted to try doing what others in the family had done in generations past," he said.
Pumpkins made sense because Josh inherited no equipment for row crops and they're relatively easy to grow.
"We instantly kind of enjoyed it, and we got a good crop that first year," Josh said. "Then we're like, 'What are we going to do with this crop?' So that's how the pumpkin patch was born. We didn't set out to have this successful U-pick operation—It just kind of evolved.
"Pumpkins are just a fun thing to grow, and there's the novelty of it. Corn isn't as exciting of a crop to produce. I can assure you that the idea never was, in 14 years I would no longer be a CPA and I'd be running a pumpkin patch. It was more of a hobby starting out and over time it's been a matter of me always wanting to find the next big attraction."
Many modern farms have turned to agritourism as means to create an additional revenue stream and frame the story of what they do in a positive light. Agritainment is an offshoot that attracts local residents to farm-related attractions and activities.
The five-acre pumpkin patch continues to anchor Harvest Tyme's season-oriented U-pick business that blends Josh's love of fairs and amusement parks with agriculture.
"I've always been fascinated by the carnival, and when I was in college I actually traveled with the carnival for three years during the summer," said the Valparaiso University graduate. "It's just one of those things where it all worked out—taking the fun of growing the pumpkins and combining it with the joy of the carnival."
Over the years, Harvest Tyme has added a popular plot featuring a variety of sunflowers, a wildflower meadow, a U-pick cut-flower field, a playground and a butterfly encounter in a hoop house. Some corn is still raised on the land, but only enough to make corn maze in the fall – a local farmer harvests it for the grain. This year's maze theme commemorated the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
Along with kiddie amusement rides, a carousel, a petting zoo and educational events such as school field trips, there are concessions—donuts are Harvest Tyme's specialty of the house—and a variety of fair-food vendors.
In the fall, the farm celebrates harvest season with another lighted event, the Trail of Lights and Pumpkin Glow tour showing off hundreds of carved pumpkins.
The operation has been a gift to the local economy. The Sickingers employ up to 70 seasonal and part-time employees, including a bevy of high-schoolers, at peak times and recently hired a full-time worker. Much of that money goes back into the community.
"You don't realize the spillover effect that comes from bringing people in from afar to a destination attraction," Josh said. "I don't have the story of: Hey, this was a dairy farm and when the market crashed and we were going to lose everything, we saved it by opening this type of thing.
"Our story is, agriculture has been in my family's past. Even though I wasn't raised in it, I came back to it and opened up something that isn't just an amusement park, but one that brings agriculture into it. To know that you have a venue that allows for the opportunity to create those memories for people is truly awesome.
"There's nothing I'd rather be doing."
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