A Maze In The Making––

Sugar Lane Neighbors Pitch In For Pumpkin Patch

By Dottie Evans

Saturday morning’s opening of the Castle Hill Farm Pumpkin Patch marks the fifth year that the Sugar Lane dairy farm has presented its ever-popular corn maze.

Of course, the six-weekend festival put on by farmer Steve Paproski also includes hayrides, pony rides, pick-your-own pumpkins, food, games, crafts, and cows, but the corn maze is what draws people in.

Every year, as they enter and eventually exit the maze, one hears gleeful shouts of, “I did it!” Sure, they solved the maze. But who created it?

Was he an MIT engineer geek with a GPS (Global Positioning System) device clamped to his automatic lawn mower?

Was he a crop circle fanatic from England enlisting help from aliens to trample the corn stalks in concentric circles?

The answer is none of the above because Mr Paproski’s corn maze maker lives much closer to home. She is his Sugar Lane neighbor Cindy McIntyre and she uses primitive materials like pencils and graph paper, and she believes the 2004 maze is her finest work yet.

“We started with easier mazes because we didn’t want anyone to get lost,” said Mr Paproski. “But this year it’s much harder with lots of dead ends and only one way out –– and we’re not telling any more,” he added.

After his wife, Diana Paproski, came up with the 2004 design theme of five pumpkins, Ms McIntyre created a grid on graph paper and laid out the maze diagram. That was over last winter. In early June, she and the Paproskis and several neighbors headed to the cornfield to mark it out.

“We began when the corn was still only six inches high,” Ms McIntyre said, adding that during that next week at her job at Filosa Convalescent Center in Danbury she worried constantly.

“I’d be at work and I’d think, ‘That corn is growing right now while I’m sitting here.’ I knew we had to finish it while we could still see what we were doing,’’ she recalled.

By the next weekend, they had completed mowing the pattern. Just in time, because the corn was already above their waists.

“To make it harder, Steve used crisscrossing rows, not horizontal and vertical ones. And the corn is planted nice and thick,” she said with relish.

Thick enough and tall enough so that while maze wanderers can hear other voices through the stalks, they will not be able to see each other or jump across to other paths.

“Even if they climb the observation platform at the center of the maze, that won’t help because the stalks are 12 feet high and you can’t see down in,” she said.

“It’s tricky…very, very tricky.”

 

Papa John In The Pumpkin Patch

Another Sugar Lane neighbor who gets involved is John Yannet, a stalwart Pumpkin Patch volunteer who appreciates and supports the purpose behind the Paproski family’s yearly income raiser. He knows that with fixed milk prices, dairy farmers these days have to supplement and diversify. And he wants to help the Paproski family in whatever way he can to preserve their 100-plus-acre farm that has been a fixture in the Sugar Lane neighborhood for generations.

Mr Yannet, who is retired, works alongside Steve and Diana Paproski and their two daughters, Stephanie, 14, and Shannon, 11. He helps with publicity, grooming the hayride trail, setting up the corn maze, and selling the pumpkins and crafts –– whatever way he can.

While Ms McIntyre is known to the family as their “Main Maze Woman,” Mr Yannet has been dubbed “Papa John.” Another Sugar Lane neighbor, Dick Madden, also pitches in, as does Ms McIntyre’s daughter, Alyssa, a senior at Newtown High School.

“We all do it because it’s fun and we like to help out. We wouldn’t miss it for anything,” Mr Yannet remarked Tuesday afternoon as he led a visitor through the S-shaped hayride route and tested the mucky black ground after a weekend’s rain had reduced the big tractor ruts to nine-inch furrows.

“I think it’s a bit soupy right now,” he told Mr Paproski, “better give it another day to dry.”

Looking over the three-acre pumpkin batch, both men seemed pleased with this year’s crop.

“These pumpkins are the real thing because they’re actually growing on the vine. They weren’t just pitched out into the field for you to pick up,” Mr Paproski said.

The Pumpkin Patch at Castle Hill Farm is at 40 Sugar Lane off Route 302 and is open Saturday, September 25, through Sunday, October 31. Hours are Fridays, 3 pm to 5 pm, and Saturdays and Sundays, 11 am to 5 pm. Also open Columbus Day Holiday, Monday, October 11, from 11 am to 5 pm. For more information, call 426-5487.