Sweet Berry Farm makes a trip to the country a real adventure. While the pick-your-own crop is out of season, the hay-field maze is filled with fun and excitement. With two locations, one west of Austin outside of Marble Falls and one east of Austin near Lexington, the farm offers a great excuse to travel the back roads.
An aerial photograph of the field west of Marble Falls confirms that the maze is cut in the shape of Texas. From the ground it looks like a thick growth of 4- to 6-foot grass with ill-defined borders. Well-trampled paths meander through the greenery leading in circles, crisscrossing, and coming to dead ends.
As an added inducement to finding your way around the maze game, 11 Texas towns are marked on the trails. If you find each of the towns and punch your card at each station, then you win a soda or bottle of water. At the Lexington farm, the maze is in the shape of America, and the hunt is for popular destinations like Disneyland and Washington, D.C.
“I don’t remember how the idea of the Texas maze was born,” says Dan Copeland, who runs the Marble Falls farm with his wife Gretchen and their two daughters. They also own the Lexington farm, but Sue Kerby runs the visitor operation. “We had a patch of ground we needed to do something with, but didn’t want to do a maze like everybody else with one way in and you have to find the one way out.”
Copeland says that the grass at his Marble Falls field isn’t as high as he would like this year. “Normally it is 6 to 8 feet tall. America (in Lexington) is that tall,” he says. Normally, Copeland gets two crops of the sorghum Sudan hay for a spring and fall maze. Soon after this fall’s crop was planted in early August it was attacked by armyworms and had to be cut and replanted.
The late planting of the Texas maze delayed its opening until mid-October. The Lexington maze opened in late September. Both will be open through the end of Nov.. In addition to the big mazes, both farms offer hayrides on a tractor-pulled trailer, goat feeding, scarecrow stuffing, smaller mazes for the younger children, and, of course, plenty of photo opportunities and jams made from the farm’s strawberry and blackberry fields.
The Copelands began clearing the mesquite and cactus from the field north of FM 1431 in 1999. By the next spring they had developed a reputation for offering wonderful strawberries to those willing to pick their own. Born and raised in the Marble Falls and Burnet area, Dan is a graduate of Texas A&M. Gretchen is from nearby Llano, where her parents still live. After working at the King’s Orchard in Plantersville in Southeast Texas for 10 years, the couple was ready to move back home.
Big, succulent strawberries are the farm’s primary crop. “Golf-ball size would be small,” Copeland says as he tries to find a comparison to illustrate the size of the fruit. The couple considered putting in peach trees, but the peach crop can be decimated by a late freeze. The strawberries are cold-hardy. If threatened with a freeze when the plants are in the budding stages, Don and Gretchen cover the plants with blankets that measure 50 feet by 300 feet. “The two of us can cover the entire field in about three hours,” Copeland says. “With peach trees, there just is not much you can do except hope for the best.”
At the end of Nov. the farm closes for the winter and then opens again next March when the strawberries begin to ripen. Copeland says around April 1 is the best time for the red berries, but they will last well into May when the red potato patch is open for dig-your-own. There will be a spring hay-field maze in May and June while the blackberries are at their peak.
Sweet Berry Farm is 1.5 miles west of Marble Falls on FM 1980, 1.2 miles north of FM 1431. The phone number is 830/798-1462. The eastern branch of the farm is 1 mile east of Lexington off of U.S. 77 on FM 696, and the phone number is 979/773-2200. Both farms are open Thursday-Tuesday, 8:30am-5:30pm; Sunday, 1-5pm; and closed on Wednesday. For more information, visit their Web site at www.sweetberryfarm.com.
649th in a series. Day Trips, Vol. 2, a book of Day Trips 101-200, is available for $8.95, plus $3.05 for shipping, handling, and tax. Mail to: Day Trips, PO Box 33284, South Austin, TX 78704.
This article appears in November 14 • 2003.
