Drive south out of Sunset Ranch on Highway 289 most weeks of the year and Preston Trail Farms looks like exactly what its sign says: a hardware and feed store. Bags of chicken scratch stacked by the door, trucks pulling in for fence posts, nothing that would stop a passerby. Then late September hits and the same parking lot fills with strollers, hay bales appear along the fence line, and the pumpkin patch that started thirty years ago as a Celina side project takes over the whole property again.
That seasonal flip is the most reliable thing on Gunter's fall calendar. It is also, this year, doing more civic work than it should have to.
The farm that doesn't wait on anyone
Preston Trail Farms sits at 15102 State Highway 289, just south of town, and the pumpkin operation running on that land goes back to 1997, when the Kimbrell family started it as the Big Orange Pumpkin Farm in Celina before relocating to the Gunter property. It is still a family business, and the fall build-out has stayed consistent for years: a hayride, a barrel train, a hay maze, a petting area with roughly fifty animals including goats, sheep, and longhorns, and pie pumpkins scattered across a working field rather than trucked in and piled on a lawn.
The cafe on-site, the Trails Cafe, is run by Stormie Law, a Gunter resident, and serves the kind of breakfast-and-burger menu that turns a pumpkin patch stop into an actual meal instead of a fifteen-minute photo op.
None of this requires a city council vote or a grant application. It requires a family that has run the same operation long enough to know exactly when to put up the maze fencing and when to take it down. That reliability is worth noting precisely because the other big outdoor gathering space in Gunter does not have it.
What a Sunset Ranch weekend there actually costs
If you're planning the trip rather than just driving past it, the numbers are straightforward and worth knowing before you load the car:
- Weekday admission (Monday through Friday): $12 per person, including a pie pumpkin, petting barn feed, hayride, roping pen, and hay maze
- Weekend admission (Saturday and Sunday): $15 per person, with the same activities plus the farm train included
The gap between those two numbers is small enough that most families end up going on whichever day their schedule allows, but if you're bringing a group, a Tuesday afternoon buys the same experience for less and without the weekend crowd. The season historically runs from late September through the end of November, so a Sunset Ranch household has roughly two months, not two weekends, to use it.
The pavilion that's been "almost started" since 2023
Now the other side of the ledger. Gunter City Park, the town's only real public gathering space, has been trying to add a large covered pavilion for a few years now. The city landed a $75,000 matching grant from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for the project, one of only 16 grants of its kind awarded that cycle to Texas cities under 20,000 people. Nancy Nevil, president of the Gunter Parks Foundation, and Adam Adams, the city's Director of Parks and Public Services, worked together on the grant submission, and city council voted to move forward with it back in July 2023.
The last public timeline marker on record has city staff meeting with TPWD representatives in March 2024 to talk through construction scheduling. Beyond that, there's no published update on groundbreaking or a completion date. For a household in Sunset Ranch weighing where to host a birthday party or a Saturday cookout, that matters: the park's covered gathering space that would make a August afternoon usable isn't sitting there waiting. It's still somewhere in a process that started three years ago.
This isn't a complaint about the city. Small-town parks departments move on small-town budgets, and a $75,000 matching grant plus construction bidding plus weather delays adds up fast when you're not a metro with a dedicated capital projects office. It's simply the honest state of things right now, in the fall of 2026: the park you'd expect to host your reunion or your kid's team pizza party doesn't have that shaded structure yet.
Two gathering spaces, one actually open
Put those two facts side by side and the pattern is hard to miss. Gunter's actual civic infrastructure for outdoor gatherings is mid-build. Gunter's de facto civic infrastructure for outdoor gatherings, at least for three months a year, is a hardware store's pumpkin patch.
That's not a knock on either one. Preston Trail Farms was never designed to be the town square, it was designed to sell pumpkins and feed. But when a family business ends up hosting more shaded, structured, come-as-you-are gatherings each fall than the town park does year-round, that says something about where a Sunset Ranch resident should actually plan to spend a Saturday between now and Thanksgiving. The farm has the covered structure, the space for fifty kids to run around at once, and thirty years of knowing how to run it. The park, for now, has the location and the intent.
If you've got out-of-town family visiting this fall, or a school group looking for a field trip, or just a Saturday morning that needs filling before the football schedule takes over, Preston Trail Farms is the one place on this list that's finished, open, and running on a schedule it has kept for years. If you're hoping to reserve a covered space at Gunter City Park for something later this year, it's worth a call to the city's Parks and Public Services office before you build plans around it. The Bridges Golf Club, the 18-hole course designed by Fred Couples that serves Gunter's south side, is worth knowing about too if golf is more your fall pace than hayrides.
What this actually means for the season ahead
None of this changes how good the neighborhood is to come home to. It does mean the fall calendar for a Sunset Ranch household runs through a feed store more than it runs through downtown, at least until that pavilion clears whatever step comes after March 2024. Plan the pumpkin trip on a weekday if you can, bring cash or a card since Preston Trail Farms takes both, and keep an eye on the city's park updates if a covered rental space matters to your plans this year.
Living in a town this size means watching projects move at town speed. It also means a thirty-year-old family farm down the road can carry more of the community's fall weekends than anyone expected it to, and that's worth knowing before you assume the calendar looks like anywhere else in Collin County.
If you're weighing whether Sunset Ranch fits what your family needs long term, from the pace of a town like Gunter to the schools zoned to your street, Moosa Realty Group knows this stretch of Highway 289 well enough to walk you through it directly. Your Move. Our Mission.
