Which Saturday do you keep free this fall: the car show at Fall Fest, or another weekend at Twin Pond Farm's corn maze before it closes? For a lot of households in Howell Township, that's not a rhetorical question. Only one of those two options is still open every weekend between now and November 1.
That's the thing about fall in Howell. The township publishes a calendar with a handful of fixed dates on it. The two properties that actually carry the season, a garden center on Route 9 and a brewery on Colts Neck Road, run on a completely different schedule, and neither one needs a rain date.
The Township's Five Fixed Dates
Howell's official fall lineup, as posted on the township's events page, comes down to five entries. Howell Day & Green Fair opened the season on September 19. Still ahead: the "Howell-o-ween" house decorating contest, with an October 15 registration deadline, Fall Fest & the Optimist Club of Howell's Annual Car Show on October 17, Trunk or Treat on October 22, and the Turkey Trot on November 15.
Howell Day & Green Fair is the biggest of the group. Past editions have run from mid-afternoon into a fireworks finale, with a Touch-a-Truck lineup of police, fire and public works vehicles, a petting zoo, cornhole, and a beer and wine garden run by the Howell Township PBA. Parking at Soldier Memorial Park has been tight enough in recent years that the township runs shuttle buses from Howell Middle School North and Howell Middle School South. Live music has included the Howell High School Marching Band and a rotating cast of local acts, among them a group organizers have described as "Howell's very own rock and roll band," playing everything from decades-old covers to their own material.
These are good events. They're also single afternoons. Blink and the calendar moves on to the next one.
The Venue That Keeps Moving
Here's a detail that only shows up if you track the Fall Fest and car show year over year: the location isn't fixed. The 2024 edition was held at Oak Glen Park on Preventorium Road. Listings for the 2025 edition point instead to Soldier Memorial Park on Lakewood Farmingdale Road. As of this writing, the township's own 2026 events page lists the October 17 date without naming a park at all.
That's not a criticism of how the event is run. It's a useful practical note: if you're planning to catch the car show or the pie-baking contest this year, check the address before you leave the house, because the last two years didn't use the same lot.
The Farm That Hasn't Moved Since 1923
Contrast that with Twin Pond Farm. The family has worked the same ground in Howell since Angelo's father bought a parcel fed by two ponds and the Manasquan River, and four generations later the operation still runs out of the same footprint: a farm stand on Route 524 that opened in 1986, and the garden center on Route 9 that opened in 1995. Neither address has changed.
This fall, that same family is running "Harvest at Howell," an agritourism season at 49 Howell Rd with a corn maze, pumpkin picking, hayrides, sunflower fields, a petting zoo and pony rides. It opened September 19, the same day as Howell Day, and it doesn't stop there. It continues weekends through November 1, which as of late September still leaves several weekends on the table.
That's the real structural difference. Howell Day was one Saturday. Twin Pond's harvest season stretches across six weeks of weekends, on land the same family has farmed since the 1920s, with a pumpkin-picking operation that doesn't need a permit renewed or a shuttle bus scheduled. If your household treats fall in Howell as a single circled date, you're working from the township's version of the calendar. If you treat it as a run of Saturdays, you're working from Twin Pond's.
The Brewery That's Technically in Farmingdale
The other fixed point sits on Colts Neck Road, and it comes with its own local wrinkle. Tall Oaks Farm + Brewery was built by the husband and wife team behind Bradley Brew Project in Bradley Beach, on five acres they picked specifically to build a hops field and a tasting room with a different feel than their beach location. As co-founder Mike Ziolkowski put it when the project was announced, the goal was "to create sort of that farm-like experience," complete with a pavilion, fire pits and Adirondack chairs.
Here's the wrinkle: the property sits inside Howell Township, but its mailing address reads Farmingdale, NJ 07727, a quirk of how Monmouth County post office boundaries were drawn decades before any of these businesses existed. First-time visitors punching the address into GPS sometimes assume they've been sent to the wrong town. They haven't. It's a Howell business with a Farmingdale zip code, and it's been true of plenty of Colts Neck Road addresses long before this brewery opened.
Unlike Twin Pond's harvest season, Tall Oaks doesn't have a closing date. It's open year-round, which means it doesn't compete with the township's calendar so much as sit outside it entirely, a place you can show up to on a random Tuesday in December with the same fire pits going.
Fitting the Two Clocks Together
So Howell's fall isn't really one calendar. It's the township's five single-day events layered against a roughly six-week run at one farm and a year-round option at another, with the harvest season closing on November 1, just two weeks before the Turkey Trot picks the civic calendar back up.
For a household actually living through the rest of this season, that suggests a simple way to plan it. Howell Day has already come and gone, so the fixed point left on the civic calendar is Fall Fest on October 17, and it's worth confirming the location closer to the date given how it's bounced between parks the last two years. Every weekend between now and November 1 is still open inventory for Twin Pond's corn maze and pumpkin picking, since that window closes for the year once the calendar turns to November. Tall Oaks doesn't need to be scheduled around fall at all. It's there whenever the fire pits are lit.
None of this is really about picking a side. It's about recognizing that the township's programming and the working farms on Route 9 and Colts Neck Road are running on separate clocks that happen to overlap for about six weeks a year, and the overlap is the best stretch of the whole season if you know to look for it.
Have a favorite Howell fall tradition we didn't mention, or a question about what a specific block or street looks like heading into winter? The Tully Group keeps close tabs on this town because it's the one we work in every day.
