Telltale signs that autumn has arrived are in Piedmont: the Harvest Festival in Piedmont Park, fall sports at Piedmont High School, foliage on trees lining neighborhood streets — and the Wildwood Dads’ Club Pumpkin Patch.
At 898 Red Rock Road on the corner of Moraga Avenue, the pumpkin patch opened Sept. 26 and runs through Halloween. Over the years, its corner near Coaches Field has become a community gathering spot for pumpkins, gourds and a shared goal: raising money to support Wildwood Elementary School.
Matt Derrigo is running the patch for his third year, and he’s doing so alongside fellow Wildwood dads Brian Fischer and Anthony Guarino. Derrigo, who lives in Piedmont, started volunteering for shifts at the patch when his daughter was in kindergarten. She’s now in middle school, but that hasn’t stopped Derrigo from taking on leadership of the pumpkin patch.
“It’s one of my joys, honestly, which is why even though my daughter left [Wildwood Elementary] two years ago, I’m still interacting and helping out,” he said.
The pumpkin patch is the volunteer-led club’s biggest fundraiser of the year, with proceeds going toward Wildwood Elementary upgrades and resources. Believed to have started sometime in the early 1980s, it opened a week earlier than normal this year largely because of how well it did last year and how popular it’s become.
On Sept. 26, Derrigo, co-organizers and other volunteers joined together for a heavy task: unloading and setting up 30 pallets of pumpkins, squash and gourds and 48 hay bales. That amounted to 13,010 pounds of pumpkins, squash and gourds and about 3,600 pounds of hay — 16,610 pounds total, or just over 8.3 tons, Derrigo noted.
This year marks other “firsts” beyond extending the patch to five weeks, including the addition of a designated photo area for families and having 28 different varieties come opening weekend. The diverse assortment is the patch’s largest to date.
Fellow Wildwood dad Fischer, an Oakland resident, said he’s worked at the pumpkin patch for the past three years and has become more familiar with the patch’s offerings, such as blue Jarrahdale and peanut pumpkins, along the way. He joined the club when his daughter started kindergarten at Wildwood; she’s now in second grade.
“I knew that there was a strong community there,” he said about the school and fellow parents.
While the Wildwood Dads Club and the patch have traditionally drawn parents of Wildwood kindergartners through fifth-graders, transitional kindergarten parents are getting involved too now that the school has a TK program.
“We’re really encouraged by the amount of signups that we got early on to volunteer, from both the TK and kindergarten communities,” Fischer said. “That’s a really good sign that there’s a next generation of parents coming in that are really interested in helping to support Wildwood and the patch.”
For Fischer, some of the strongest relationships he has formed with other Wildwood parents began with an ordinary pumpkin patch shift.
“It’s a great opportunity to partner up with another adult that you might not know that well, but the kids are friends at school, and have them play together at the patch,” he said.
Although the Wildwood Dads’ Club leads the fundraiser, all Wildwood parents and guardians can volunteer. A typical shift at the patch involves two people handling sales and helping customers.
“Any parent is welcome to do it, and they do,” said Derrigo. “I was just having a conversation with a mother and her son who have continued to do it year-over-year, who absolutely love it.”
The youth who volunteer are part of the patch’s charm.
“It’s great to watch the kids interact with the customers and learn the little things,” Derrigo said. “We try to teach them to never leave hands full and to help take the pumpkins and make piles, and they love checking our customers out.”
At the patch, the orange carving pumpkin remains the most popular by volume, particularly later in October. The American Tondo, a green pumpkin, is another perennial favorite. Then there’s Giant Jack.
Each year, the Dads Club brings in an Atlantic Giant pumpkin that literally tips the scale. Patch visitors can enter a “Guess the Weight” contest, and the person whose guess comes closest wins the pumpkin, which is delivered to their home before Halloween.
“Over the years, it has become part contest, part photo attraction and part mascot for the patch,” Derrigo said.
On the Friday before the patch’s opening day, Fischer put up wooden pumpkin patch signs around town on staked posts and tree trunks.
“It’s fun setting those up by yourself and literally hugging trees to try to get the ties around them,” he said. “I love seeing people passing by — they know what we’re doing, and they’re smiling and waving.”
The pumpkin-shaped signs are more than decoration — they’re effective marketing. Derrigo said a survey conducted a couple of years ago found that the signage was the most common way customers learned about the patch. Listing the patch on Google Maps and, this year, on 510 Families, an online guide to family activities around the East Bay, has helped broaden the patch’s reach.
“It’s been great to meet people from all over the Bay Area that are starting to recognize that we’re there — and the reason why we’re there,” Derrigo said.
For Fischer, the patch remains fundamentally about Wildwood and Piedmont.
“It’s so rewarding to see parents come and thank us for what we’re doing,” he said. “It’s really a sense of community, not just for Wildwood itself — all of Piedmont seems to really get behind us and support our initiative.”
JL Odom is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco who can be reached at jlodomphd@gmail.com. When they’re not covering the Bay Area, they’re usually training for their next marathon.
FYI
The Wildwood Dads’ Club Pumpkin Patch at 898 Red Rock Road in Piedmont is open through Oct. 31 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays and from 4 to 6 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. Youths can complete a coloring sheet found online at bayareane.ws/wwdc2026colorsheet and bring it to the patch for a free “Wee-B-Little” pumpkin.