We took a stroll to Basse’s Taste of Country in Colgate, this weekend. Shanna and I took our girls to go experience the farm activities and pick up a few pumpkins. It was a fun little adventure that was a lot more popular than we were expecting, but we never felt crowded. There were so many activities and everything was clean and well-kept.
Fifteen Minutes with Fuzz
A podcast about positive things happening in and around Washington County, Wisconsin
Basse’s Taste of Country w/Shanna Martin
Transcript
(click to expand)[00:00:00] Fuzz Martin: Thanks for listening to Fifteen Minutes with Fuzz. I’m your host, Fuzz Martin. And on this week’s episode, my wife, Shanna and I explore a local pumpkin farm. Hey, if you liked the show, be sure to subscribe on Spotify or Apple podcasts. You can also follow me on Facebook. Instagram and Twitter at 15 with fuzz or visit my website 15 minutes 15 with fuzz.
com. It was shorter if I took the minutes portion out of it. And with that 15 minutes on Basse’s country farm here on 15 minutes with fuzz.
Man, we just got done at the pumpkin farm and boy is my arm tired.
[00:01:05] Shanna Martin: Should be, you were carrying a medicine ball from the inside to the outside.
[00:01:10] Fuzz Martin: I was carrying a giant medicine ball, but we’ll get to that coming up. So this weekend we decided it would be cool to go to, we always go to a pumpkin farm at least once a year somewhere,
[00:01:24] Shanna Martin: kind
[00:01:26] Fuzz Martin: of switch it around a little bit.
When we lived in Dodge County for a few years, we’d go to Waldvogels, and uh, we’ve been all over the place. We’ve been to a number of different things. And this week, we went to one that we’ve never been to before, which is in the southwest corner of Washington County. It might be in Waukesha County. I’m not totally positive where the county line is.
[00:01:48] Shanna Martin: It’s on the border. It’s,
[00:01:49] Fuzz Martin: it’s on the border. It’s in Colgate, which straddles the line between Washington and Waukesha counties. And I always get Colgate and Cascade confused, but Colgate’s down in the Southwest corner and Cascade is in the Northeast corner, but it’s actually in Sheboygan County.
[00:02:06] Shanna Martin: I appreciate how you’re using our motions right now to like point which direction.
Yeah. It’s just so
[00:02:10] Fuzz Martin: if you’re listening at home, I pointed to your, uh, front right, and then to your back left. Um, Or opposite, depending on which way you’re facing. Uh, so for a while, I wasn’t sure how to pronounce it. Is it bassies, bassies, bassays, basses? And then I called them, because I wanted to do an interview with them, but they, they were too busy.
Uh, it’s Basse’s. Basse’s Like, bossy like a,
[00:02:44] Shanna Martin: like you’re an Aussie,
[00:02:45] Fuzz Martin: like you’re an, or like a sheep. Oh yeah. So at first I had not had any clue as to what to expect at this place. I was expecting a wagon with pumpkins on it.
[00:03:01] Shanna Martin: Yeah, there was a short list. We had started collecting ideas, like, Oh, let’s try and do pumpkin farm.
And we just started kind of like, we said, we’re going to go to
[00:03:07] Fuzz Martin: two in one day. Yes.
[00:03:07] Shanna Martin: Our goal was to do two in one day. And then we pulled into the parking lot.
[00:03:13] Fuzz Martin: And then the traffic director waved us into the parking lot and we drove about a quarter mile down and parked. Yeah. And we were in the first row of about eight rows.
[00:03:26] Shanna Martin: And they had only been open for about 45 minutes.
[00:03:29] Fuzz Martin: Yeah. And it was packed and it was cool. I was very surprised by how large this place was.
[00:03:39] Shanna Martin: And how like efficient we got in, I’m sure you have all the cool ins and outs of um, the, like everything’s online, you have to pay for it. Yeah, everything’s cashless,
[00:03:53] Fuzz Martin: they take credit, debit, or mobile payments.
Uh, speaking of that, total side note, I’m going to a work trip soon, and we’re taking clients out. Um, And the client requested, I asked where they wanted to go, and they gave me the name of this restaurant in Louisville called Pat’s. And I’m like, okay, fine, we can go there, that’s cool. How many people are going?
And they’re like, 12 to 15. Okay. Um, And then he called me back, he’s like, just so you know, also, they don’t take credit card. Uh, but now I, I went, I called them and they actually do take credit card, but apparently up until like two years ago, they did not take credit card. So I was going to have to ask my CFO to give me a blank check so I could pay for dinner.
Uh, but anyway. Basse’s is cashless. So if you’re going, bring a card.
[00:04:48] Shanna Martin: Yep. Just note to self. Yeah. But when we, like, it was very efficient going in and after seeing a large parking lot full of lots of people, um, we didn’t know what to expect. And surprisingly, even with lots and lots of people there, there was so many things to do and it’s so spread out that it didn’t feel like.
There was so many people there, which was cool. No, it didn’t. It didn’t. Just so many. So many things.
[00:05:15] Fuzz Martin: Yeah, another thing to, um, one, I recommend buying your tickets online because the line is pretty long. And if you’re going on a weekend, the line is long. It’s not as long if you have prepaid. So we bought them online, download it.
They’re very tech forward. I downloaded them to my Apple wallet and was able to just show the four tickets on my iPhone. And then they give you a wristband and also stamp your hand with an invisible ink, which is pretty cool. Which everyone was excited about. I was like, Hey, it’s like, Hey, did that work?
And they’re like, yeah, it’s invisible. I’m like, Oh, that’s cool. Um, nobody’s cheating you guys. That’s good. Tickets are 16. 99 each. For anyone 24 months or over during the weekends in October. So I’m 517 months old. Nice. So 1699 for me. , you’re 481 months old, 1699 for you. Mm-Hmm. , our 6-year-old, 1699 during the week.
Uh, and of course your 17-year-old as well. Mm-Hmm. , uh, during the week, it’s 1299 each, and you get a free pumpkin, I believe.
[00:06:25] Shanna Martin: I think pumpkins included in the price during the week, but not on the weekend. Not on the weekend. It’s a little different.
[00:06:29] Fuzz Martin: Yeah. So, but when you walk through those gates and it, many pumpkin farms are very farm feeling.
This doesn’t feel not farmy, but it feels very retail and put together well. Like it’s very
[00:06:45] Shanna Martin: Yes. Like there’s, there’s farm things, but also there’s like food trucks and there’s, it’s spread out where it’s. Commercial farm, I guess? It feels
[00:06:57] Fuzz Martin: more like you’re at a
[00:06:59] Shanna Martin: Like an amusement park.
[00:07:00] Fuzz Martin: An amusement park or a county fair than it does that you’re at a actual farm.
It is a farm.
[00:07:08] Shanna Martin: It is a farm. And there’s hay rides. There’s hay rides, yeah. All, all of those things. They’ve
[00:07:12] Fuzz Martin: got a corn maze. They’ve got two corn mazes.
[00:07:15] Shanna Martin: There’s chickens and bunnies. Yes. They’ve got a bunny truck and a chicken
[00:07:19] Fuzz Martin: truck. Yes. There are, uh, there’s a haunted house. Well, there’s lots of stuff. I mean, but from a, from a farm side of things, yes.
But it’s also very clean and very spread out for the thousands of people that were there. It didn’t feel like it.
[00:07:40] Shanna Martin: Yeah. It was pretty cool. I appreciate how, when we went through the corn maze, like we, There’s two different corn mazes, and we chose to go through the smaller one because The six year old was with us and we’re like, yeah, we’ll see how this goes.
And a little passport and she was, you know, marking off things as we were going. Even though it was kind of a muddy day, like the corn maze was clean and picked up and didn’t feel there was, you know, there wasn’t,
[00:08:08] Fuzz Martin: I do recommend wearing shoes if you’re going to do the corn maze, wear shoes that you’re not afraid to get dirty or wear shoes that are kind of grippy in the mud would be good.
Um, cause it’s a little bit, it’s the,
[00:08:20] Shanna Martin: it had rained that too recently.
[00:08:23] Fuzz Martin: And the, the paths are so clean, they’re, they don’t have corn laying down in them. It’s just the path. Right. So when it rains and it rained for like four or five days straight, it was still kind of slick, but it’s clean and cool. And they’ve got fun activities.
There’s like a whodunit kind of murder mystery and another one, I forget what it’s about, but we did the whodunit one.
[00:08:51] Shanna Martin: Yeah. We did the one that was a little smaller. That was super fun. It
[00:08:54] Fuzz Martin: was fun. And there’s
[00:08:55] Shanna Martin: so many other things. So like the corn maze, you kind of have to like walk all the way through to get to the corn maze, which is kind of like in the back corner, but then in front of it, there was, there was food trucks in front of it and there was giant games that you could play.
And there’s kind of like a cool truck that you could chalk draw on. So we were doing all kinds of fun little chalk drawings inside and outside. Um, there’s so many just,
[00:09:19] Fuzz Martin: it was called the Chalkolet truck or something like that. It was fun. Yeah, it was cool. Like chalk. It was a pun. It was? I was. You don’t
[00:09:27] Shanna Martin: remember it?
Was it chalk? It
[00:09:30] Fuzz Martin: was chalk a lit. It was like the chalk a lit milk truck.
[00:09:35] Shanna Martin: Okay. Oh, that’s what it was, because it was milk truck. Yeah. Yeah. And then they had a tractor pull, where you literally pull a tractor. Yeah. And they have a little VW bug that looks like a pumpkin. And if you’re looking to go take like little fall family pictures, probably not like officially photographer pictures, but if you want to go like set your kids up, there is about a.
Billion different places that you can go take cutesy little fall pictures too. It was like, Oh, posed by the flowers, posed by the pumpkins, posed by all of these different things. And, um, they have a giant
[00:10:03] Fuzz Martin: slide that are, uh, well, like one of those slides where you get a burlap sack and slide down and our six year old did that.
I don’t know, a dozen times.
[00:10:13] Shanna Martin: And.
[00:10:13] Fuzz Martin: And
[00:10:15] Shanna Martin: there’s a beer barn.
[00:10:16] Fuzz Martin: There is a beer barn.
[00:10:17] Shanna Martin: And that’s pretty cool. That’s full, full of beer. And lots of snacks and they had amazing cider donuts.
[00:10:25] Fuzz Martin: Yeah, they were really good.
[00:10:26] Shanna Martin: And popcorn and there’s shiplap. Shiplap
[00:10:29] Fuzz Martin: everywhere. All over the
[00:10:30] Shanna Martin: place. They
[00:10:30] Fuzz Martin: had. This corn crib, which is for the uninitiated, is a thing where you store corn, but they turned it into a 3D maze for the kids.
It would, I would be too big for it, but it kind of reminds me of the playhouses at McDonald’s where there’s like a maze that you crawl up through like tubes and things like that. You take off your shoes, you crawl in through the front, and then you go up, and then down, and there’s apparently just a maze that you crawl through, and our youngest loved that, and She spent a lot of time in it.
There are a few things that you have to pay extra for if you want to do, I know one of them is the Pony rinds, which was a point of contention. Uh, and the only reason we didn’t do it was because to go back to the line to pick us, it’s cashless, so you have to have a ticket. So if you want to do that, buy it up front, but you can’t buy it online.
You have to buy it
[00:11:31] Shanna Martin: when you’re checking it. You have
[00:11:32] Fuzz Martin: to buy it when you’re checking it. Uh, but it was. You know, we were, we were able to circumvent that.
[00:11:39] Shanna Martin: There was lots of, there was so many things to do. They like, oh, we’ll just walk to the other side and then you can’t see ’em anymore.
[00:11:44] Fuzz Martin: Exactly. And
[00:11:45] Shanna Martin: it worked out fine.
[00:11:46] Fuzz Martin: It did. There’s a giant spiderweb thing. A really tall, there’s like tiger stacked together with
[00:11:52] Shanna Martin: like a little fly, like king of the mountain kinda thing. Mm-Hmm. ,
[00:11:54] Fuzz Martin: big John Deere flag up on top. Yeah. Yeah. It, there’s like
[00:11:58] Shanna Martin: those pillow things you could jump on. They’re like inflatable. Yeah, jumpy things that look like pillows cuz yeah, they’re
[00:12:05] Fuzz Martin: like big rubber tarps that they’ve inflated So it’s like a giant like a really big Kind of bounce house, but that house just like an open air kind of bouncing thing and it looks Like a lot of fun, but we didn’t get to go on it because
[00:12:23] Shanna Martin: by the time we got to that point, then the line was really long.
Yeah. And then there was negotiating.
[00:12:28] Fuzz Martin: We negotiated. We negotiated. Now you can take a hay ride, which is additional fee for to go get a pumpkin in the hay field or in the pumpkin field, in the hay wagon, but we said, let’s go get one of the out front pumpkins. And just pay for that there.
[00:12:48] Shanna Martin: And it’s 47 cents a pound.
47 cents
[00:12:51] Fuzz Martin: a pound. But our negotiation to get the six year old to Be okay with us leaving was, you can pick out
[00:12:59] Shanna Martin: any pumpkin that you want.
[00:13:02] Fuzz Martin: Yes. So usually
[00:13:04] Shanna Martin: the rule, let’s backtrack, usually the rule is you have to get a pumpkin that you can carry. Right. If you can’t carry the pumpkin, you can’t get it. So that way as you get bigger, you get a bigger pumpkin.
[00:13:13] Fuzz Martin: Yes.
[00:13:13] Shanna Martin: Well, we threw that out the window when we were at the point where we had done lots and lots of things, and we all had so much fun, and we didn’t want it to, like, end
[00:13:21] Fuzz Martin: With me carrying a screaming child out of the Right.
[00:13:23] Shanna Martin: Like, we needed to end on a positive note, because we were having fun, but everyone was getting a little tired.
And so
[00:13:29] Fuzz Martin: We had eaten doughnuts and kettle corn, but there was no real protein consumed there, so we were getting a little, we could have, there was options, we just chose not to because we also
[00:13:39] Shanna Martin: had to get home. So, we’re like, okay, here’s the deal, we’re not going to do any more activities, you can pick out.
Any pumpkin you want.
[00:13:49] Fuzz Martin: Any pumpkin. And you know what? She did pick out any pumpkin she wanted. She
[00:13:53] Shanna Martin: did. You know what she did? She went through and found a big one. And she was like, nope, I don’t want that one. And she found another big one. She’s like, nope, I don’t want that one either. The rest of us all had our pumpkins at that point.
[00:14:05] Fuzz Martin: Yes.
[00:14:05] Shanna Martin: And she was like, no, I want that one!
[00:14:10] Fuzz Martin: Yeah.
[00:14:11] Shanna Martin: Well?
[00:14:13] Fuzz Martin: That one was a forty pound pumpkin.
[00:14:16] Shanna Martin: It sure was. The other
[00:14:17] Fuzz Martin: three pumpkins added up to 36 pounds. Together, this pumpkin, 40 pounds.
[00:14:23] Shanna Martin: And mind you, it was a busy Saturday. It was. So the wagons to carry the pumpkins to your car were all being used.
[00:14:32] Fuzz Martin: And we were parked all the way down at the end of the first row, which was almost literally a quarter mile from the entrance where we bought the pumpkin.
[00:14:42] Shanna Martin: So if you’re planning, plan ahead a little bit when it comes to purchasing pumpkins. And
[00:14:48] Fuzz Martin: so I carried it, we had to stop multiple times.
[00:14:53] Shanna Martin: It looked like a medicine ball.
[00:14:54] Fuzz Martin: It does. Yeah. I guess he was carrying, carrying the pumpkin. And she was giving me instructions like, be careful not to drop it. And she was
[00:14:59] Shanna Martin: in all her glory, like marching down and, cause everybody that walked by looked at it and they’re like, wow.
She’s like, that’s my pumpkin. Yeah. Even the, the crossing.
[00:15:11] Fuzz Martin: Yep.
[00:15:12] Shanna Martin: Person. Stop the car. She’s like, it looks like you guys got some heavy ones and he stopped the cars so we could travel across the little road through the parking lot because. You were carrying a 40 pound pumpkin.
[00:15:26] Fuzz Martin: And finally I had to set the pumpkin down and then go get, I walked to the car.
Yeah, you thought
[00:15:31] Shanna Martin: like ahead, like why at this point we’re set it down and we all kind of like guarded the pumpkin and then you went and got the car and brought it up and drove the car to,
[00:15:39] Fuzz Martin: yeah, but there’s not a way for you to, which is, uh, some infrastructure that I’m sure they’ll work on in the future, hint hint, um, is.
There’s not really a way for you to like, go get your pumpkin, uh, like, buy your pumpkins, go drive up to the front, and grab them, at least we didn’t. And that’s why they have
[00:16:00] Shanna Martin: the wagons, I think, is that if you, if there’s enough wagons, you wagon them out to your car.
[00:16:05] Fuzz Martin: But even then, like, wagoning it, you’d have to wagon it back, and then come back.
You’d have to wagon, yeah.
[00:16:09] Shanna Martin: It’s like a,
[00:16:10] Fuzz Martin: pretty soon you’ve got all of your steps in for the day.
[00:16:12] Shanna Martin: Right.
[00:16:13] Fuzz Martin: Bringing your pumpkin back and forth. But!
[00:16:15] Shanna Martin: It’s a really good exercise.
[00:16:16] Fuzz Martin: There were nice pumpkins. They are nice pumpkins. There’s a
[00:16:18] Shanna Martin: huge selection of pumpkins and they even have them like sorted. You got like pie pumpkins, you got the white pumpkins, you’ve got like green pumpkins, you’ve got squash, and then you’ve got all the pumpkins lined up everywhere.
Um, And they also have the, the, like, country market kind of thing that we did not go into, but you can just go to that part where you can pick pumpkins and go buy all kinds of, like, goodies inside of there, too.
[00:16:42] Fuzz Martin: Yep, exactly. So that’s, uh, Basse’s, uh, Taste of Country, located, it’s like a mile, And a half north of Landon Road in Colgate and recommend you going.
It’s, it’s cool. If you haven’t been there, it’s fun. And I, I’m, we’ll probably end up going back again some other day.
[00:17:08] Shanna Martin: Yes, we will.
[00:17:09] Fuzz Martin: All right. It was a big hit. Very good. And that’ll do it for Fifteen Minutes with Fuzz. I appreciate you joining us. Again, if you like the show, be sure to subscribe and tell your friends to listen too.
And we’ll talk to you again next Monday, right here on Fifteen Minutes with Fuzz.