Growing up in Las Vegas, I never realized I was missing out on a Halloween ritual most other kids experience. I would wear a costume, go trick-or-treating and carve a jack-o’-lantern, but I never got to actually pick my pumpkin. My mom always bought ours at the grocery store.

The Valley’s now dotted with parking-lot knockoffs attempting to offer a pumpkin-patch atmosphere, with bales of hay on the asphalt and random attractions like trains and trampolines—but the real It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown experience can only be found at Gilcrease Orchard.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, a crowd had amassed at the Centennial Hills farm, where more than 150 tons of pumpkins grow on 12 of its 60 green acres each year. Families were out in droves, fathers pushing red wheelbarrows full of fall’s bounty and children gleefully running through the rows to claim pumpkins on the vine (50 cents per pound) as their own—but only when they spotted just the right one.

A tour guide megaphoned from a covered-wagon caravan while people near the patch entrance munched on Gilcrease’s apple-cider donuts and washed them down with pear cider.

With a rainstorm on the way, a cool breeze was in the air. Looking at the towering mountains with the Strip nowhere in sight, I didn’t even need to pick a pumpkin. The Gilcrease experience was enough on its own.

Gilcrease Orchard Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday & Sunday through October, 7 a.m.-2 p.m. 7800 N. Tenaya Way, 702-409-0655, thegilcreaseorchard.org.