As The Wheatland Sun reported, Brendan Stuessy missed his slot in the watermelon-eating contest at Bishop's Pumpkin Farm on August 29 and climbed in anyway, racing a one-minute timer with a quarter-melon and no seat left to fill. "I actually missed my competition slot, but I still wanted to compete against myself," he told The Wheatland Sun afterward, face still dripping. It was a small moment at a brand-new event, the farm's first-ever Watermelon Festival, and it happened three weeks before the pumpkins most people associate with the place had even been planted for picking.
If your mental calendar for Bishop's starts in October, you are already behind the farm's own schedule. The Wheatland property opened for a bonus weekend on August 28, closed for four days to reset, then resumed daily operation on September 4 and will run through November 15. That is roughly eleven and a half weeks of public season stretched around a pumpkin crop that owner Wayne Bishop has said only holds up well for nine to ten weeks. The gap between those two numbers is not an accident. It is the reason a watermelon festival exists at all, and it is the reason the single richest pumpkin weigh-off in the world was scheduled to land in Wheatland on Saturday, September 26.
The melon weekend was a fix, not a bonus
Every fall, a working pumpkin farm runs into the same problem: pumpkins picked too early rot in the field before customers show up, and pumpkins left too long split or soften on the vine. A nine-to-ten-week window is tight when your public season needs to cover Labor Day through Thanksgiving week. Bishop looked for a crop that could handle late-summer heat better than a pumpkin can, found it in watermelon, and used it to open the gates almost three weeks earlier than usual.
The bet paid off in real numbers on opening weekend. Wait times for festival treats like watermelon floats and watermelon bread stretched to about 45 minutes by Saturday afternoon, and the eating contests pulled in dozens of competitors across age groups. Bishop has been careful not to oversell it as a permanent fixture, since a melon crop lives and dies by weather in a way a fall pumpkin display doesn't.
"We never want to take on too much in one calendar year or not do something with 100 percent effort," Bishop said.
That caution is worth noting because it tells you something about how this particular farm makes decisions. It is not chasing every trend that could draw a bigger crowd. It tested one new idea, watched what happened, and is deciding whether to repeat it based on what the weather and the guests actually did, not on what looked good on paper in the spring.
The world's richest pumpkin contest only got here in 2023
The other thing on the farm's calendar this season had nothing to do with watermelons and everything to do with a competition that predates the farm itself by more than fifty years. The National Pumpkin Weigh-Off started in 1921 and has moved twice in recent memory, first from Elk Grove to the Nut Tree in Vacaville, and then in 2023 to Bishop's Pumpkin Farm in Wheatland. That means the contest has called this stretch of Highway 65 home since 2023. Longtime Yuba County residents who haven't been out to the farm since before then may not know it's held there at all.
The 2026 Weigh-Off was scheduled for Saturday, September 26, with judging set to begin at 9 a.m.; growers from across the United States and Canada were expected to bring giant pumpkins and other oversized vegetables to the scale. The prize structure is what earns the "richest" label: the first pumpkin over 3,000 pounds pays out $75,000, and any record-setting entry has to stay on-site for two weeks afterward so the result can be verified. The event is organized by the California Pumpkin Growers Club, a member of the international Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, which sets the rules for weigh-offs held around the world. Club chairman Brian Myers said the group was "excited to partner with Bishop's Pumpkin Farm to host the National Pumpkin Weigh-Off."
For a Yuba County resident, the practical version of this is simple. A world-class agricultural competition with a six-figure total prize pool was scheduled about twenty miles north of Roseville, inside the county, on a Saturday morning that otherwise looked like any other fall weekend.
What actually costs money, and when
Bishop's keeps admission free every day of the season, which surprises people used to paying to walk through the gate at other fall attractions. The catch is that pricing shifts by month and by day of the week in ways that are easy to miss if you only visit once a year.
- September and November: Parking is free every day, and all-you-can-ride wristbands are sold daily until two hours before closing.
- October weekdays: Parking is free, and ride wristbands are still sold as usual.
- October Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays: Parking is charged, and wristbands are not sold at all. Rides run on a per-ticket basis instead.
- October 31 specifically: Parking is free again, the one exception inside the month.
The u-pick pumpkin pricing changed for this season too. As of 2026, the farm stopped charging by weight. Pumpkins picked in the hayride field are a flat five dollars each. Pumpkins on display at the Harvest Barn near the entrance run five or fifteen dollars depending on size, small gourds are a dollar apiece or six for five dollars, and the jumbo Prizewinner pumpkins are fifty dollars flat. If you're the type who fills a truck bed every October, that's a different math problem than weighing everything at the register.
The rest of a day out there
Past the melons and the giant pumpkins, the farm still runs on the same mix of attractions that have anchored it for years: a corn maze and sunflower labyrinth to get lost in, a hayride out to the pumpkin field, a train loop around the property, Charlie's Carousel, Bishop's Flying Service, and Farmer Bill's Tootling Tractors for the younger kids. NASPIG racing draws a crowd at the barn, and the Weeland Petting Zoo and Fort Alotafun give families a place to slow down between rides. Babe's Cookiactory turns out warm chocolate chip cookies, the Cider Mill sells its Slushakie, and Mrs. B's Country Bakery is the stop most people make on the way out, not the way in.
None of that is new this year. What's new is the shape of the season around it. A farm that used to compress everything into a four-weekend October sprint now opens in late August, closes briefly to reset, and runs a slow eleven-week arc into mid-November, with the world's biggest pumpkin contest sitting near the front half of that stretch instead of the back.
If you've been treating Bishop's as an October errand you fit in once the weather cools, this is the year that assumption is behind the actual calendar. The farm moved first.
If you went to Wheatland for the Weigh-Off on September 26, or are headed out any weekend before the season closes on November 15, I'd love to hear what you saw—or what you find. Send me a note through Jennifer Giffin and let's compare notes on your visit.
