Closed Until Summer 2024
About Goldpetal Farms
Fall Sunflower Maze & Pick-Your-Own Flowers
We design and operate seasonal sunflower mazes and pick-your-own flower gardens in Southern Maryland and pick-your-own sunflower field in Virginia Beach, Virgina.
Looking for a fun adventure for yourself, your friends or your family? Visit one of our seasonal living mazes and pick-your-own sunflower fields and experience the glory of walking through a field of giant sunflowers.
Looking for one-of-a-kind photo opportunities? Our flowers, fields and country setting make great photo memories. Both of our locations are a popular destination for everyone, including professional photographers.
We also love helping our visitors learn about our ecosystem with fun activities and guides.
The Sunflower Maze Design Process
We start planning our maze designs months in advance and are always trying new, innovative design ideas. One maze takes about 250 hours and over two months to get it ready for opening day.
Each spring (usually mid-to-late April) and once the ground soil temperature reaches 60 degrees, we start planting our sunflower seed mix. This temperature is necessary to ensure the seeds germinate uniformly. Our mazes take up three to four acres.
As the plants are growing, we begin plotting out the maze design the old-fashioned way — completely by hand using landmarks, stakes and by roping off areas. As soon as the sunflowers are about 12 inches tall, we cut the maze out of the growth. Then the flowers and other plants are left to mature and grow.
The Flowers, Plants and Pollinators
The first flowers to bloom on our fields are buckwheat. Ten days later, we’ll see mustard blooms. Buckwheat and mustard are used by our native pollinators as well as by the honey bees we keep on the farm.
Two weeks after the mustard is done blooming, our sunflowers begin to bloom. If we’re fortunate with the weather, we’ll enjoy about three to four weeks of gorgeous sunflowers. In total, our pollinators enjoy about eight weeks of floral food, and that makes them very happy. Us, too.
Our Maryland location re-opens in summer 2023.
Thank you to all who came out and enjoyed our beautiful sunflower mazes, cut-flower gardens and family farm. We enjoyed seeing your faces, many returning and many new ones. We count you all as friends and hope you received as much joy out of our little patch of heaven as we did creating it. We look forward to seeing you all next summer.
Our 2022 “Metamorphosis” season celebrated our beloved butterflies.
Goldpetal Farms is a key location for our east coast migrating Monarchs. We are honored to play a significant role in their autumn journey south.
We were happy to have our 2021 season dedicated to Bob Ross!
® Bob Ross Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
