Red Hen Farm

At the end of September 2026 the big pumpkins at Red Hen Farm & Orchard lay cut and piled in the field. After a couple of frosts the farmers had taken them off the vine rather than lose them to the cold. The small ones had kept under the leaves and were left for visitors to cut themselves. An old-fashioned scale gave weight and price. Baby pumpkins cost two dollars apiece and orange pumpkins of 5 to 100 pounds cost 75 cents a pound. Blue, white and warty specialty pumpkins, along with spaghetti, kabocha, acorn and butternut squash, went for a dollar a pound.

The pumpkin hunt on Spurgin Road

The 2026 pumpkin hunt ran on the evening of Saturday, September 26, and again on Friday and Saturday, October 2 and 3. The farm kept some tools and carts but asked pickers to bring a wagon and hand pruners. “Gloves are great,” it advised, “as fresh stems are prickly.” A week before the first evening the farm had posted a warning: “start doing arm curls, because we have a huge number of 50-100 pounders!” Thirty pumpkin varieties had gone into the fields that summer. “We are very proud to grow every pumpkin and squash we sell,” the farm wrote. There were nonalcoholic drinks in a cooler, blankets and chairs, and a picnic and bonfire area. After the first weekend the farm reported “a couple days of a lot of people filling up wagons with pumpkins, but the patch is still pretty loaded.”

The farm lies on Spurgin Road, west of Reserve Street and just outside the city limits. The Mountain Line Route 9 bus stops nearby at the corner of Clements and Spurgin. In the fall the farm stand sells pumpkins, squash, jams, raspberries, elderberry syrup, flowers, and caps and shirts bearing the farm’s logo. Earlier in the summer it carried tea, eggs, herbs, lettuce and salves.

A freeze on Mother’s Day weekend

The pumpkins came at the end of a poor year. A freeze over Mother’s Day weekend took the apple and plum crop and brought a fungus into the orchard. The farmers pruned it out, and by July the trees looked “amazing, just no fruit.” The freeze also hit the early strawberries. That summer the farm put down its guardian dog, Clover, and after losing her it lost more than half its flock of chickens. A note on the farm’s website summed up the season: “This spring’s late freeze took our apple blossoms and set our raspberries way behind schedule. It’s been a hard season for us, but the farm is still giving, and we’d love to see you out here.”

The raspberries never fully recovered. On September 19, the morning after a lightning storm passed a mile to the south, the farm managed “a decent raspberry pick” and posted a comparison: “This year is different from last. We were easily picking 30-50 pints every day. We are fortunate if we can get 10 a day every other day now.”

The blueberries did better. In August the farm held blueberry and flower u-picks on Tuesday and Thursday mornings from 9 to 11, by reservation. Flower buckets cost $15 and $30. The farm is also adding more bushes from a 500-plant order. On the evening of September 17, volunteers set out so many plants that they added an extra row. Soil Cycle showed them how to make compost tea and pour it on the new plants, and Bridge Pizza donated the food. The second half of the order was to go in during October.

In May, other volunteers had spread wood chips around the berry plants. The farm explained why: “Our soil in MT is alkaline.” As the chips break down, they make organic acids that change the soil’s pH over time, and they give fungi something to grow in, which blueberries need.

The red barn and its bonfires

The newest building on the farm is a red barn with working weathervanes. In December 2024 the Montana Department of Commerce awarded Red Hen Farm and Orchard, LLC $31,484.99 for a “Red Hen Farm Classroom and Farm Stay Project.” That grant round split more than $350,000 among 17 agritourism projects. The barn and a glamping tent were paid for in part with those funds. The barn opened to the public in June 2026, with two entrances, a covered patio and a lot of natural light. The tent sleeps seven.

Julie Engh Peters, a certified life coach and a trained Gottman leader, runs much of what happens in the barn. Her Gottman couples’ date nights are set for four Wednesdays in the fall of 2026: October 28 and November 4, 11 and 18. Couples meet in the barn and then spread out around it and outside by the bonfires. In September 2026 she led a weekend Living Well retreat on perimenopause and menopause with Dr. Courtney Hathaway and Lisa Hamilton, and guests could pitch tents on the farm. Engh Peters told the state what she wants the place to be: “We would like our reach to encompass our community as well as those from other cities and states, giving people an agricultural connection and education, a retreat and a window into Montana’s small, local agriculture and hospitality.”

Ten acres in Target Range

The sources give slightly different starting dates. In 2018 the Community Food & Agriculture Coalition wrote that Greg Peters and Julie Engh-Peters had moved onto the property with their children five years earlier and planted an orchard. In 2023 Julie Peters told KPAX that she and her husband started the farm about ten years before, with apples and strawberries. Strawberries are still her favorite fruit to grow. At first they relied on word of mouth. “In Montana, that works!” the farm wrote in 2020. At first nearly all their business was u-pick, with people coming out from the city to pick strawberries and raspberries. Later they added a CSA but kept the u-pick.

When the coalition brought 30 beginning farmers to Red Hen for a field day in 2018, the ten acres held raspberries, strawberries, honeyberries, goji berries, currants and blueberries. A local coffee roaster sent its spent grounds for compost. A brewer sent spent barley to feed the orchard soil. Local restaurants supplied used vegetable oil to run the farm’s diesel vehicles. Squash grew on hugelkultur mounds built over wood left from landscaping jobs. Greg also runs Peter’s Landscaping & Design.

In the spring of 2020 the farm planted 250 trees in one push. Julie credited “Greg’s kubota skills and planting efficiency,” the neighbors who helped, and “of course the children (who helped for a wee amount of time and then just played in the holes).” That spring they also grafted about 500 new apple trees and started tomatoes, peppers and ground cherries in a high tunnel in February. The CSA filled so fast that they set about expanding the fields. By 2021 the stand was open for self-serve most days from 10 to 7, selling honeyberries, strawberries, garlic scapes, peppermint, oregano and dill. Their sons, Everett and Soren, are now listed among the farm’s operators.

In 2023 Red Hen was a stop on the coalition’s Bike to Barns tour. It hosted the kickoff brunch, where guests picked berries to top waffles served by Green Source. “You have people biking and they’re so joyful,” Julie Peters said. “They show up and get yummy fruit, and then they go on their merry way.”

The farm sits on old farmland. Irrigation canals run through the Target Range and Orchard Homes neighborhoods, and growing food has been the main work there since the 1890s. In 2018 High Country News reported that only 8.9 percent of Missoula County’s prime agricultural soils remained, and half of those lay in these two neighborhoods. Subdivisions kept coming, the most recent then being Spurgin Ranch, 20 acres of farmland cut into 19 lots. That winter Greg Peters and the flower farmer George Hart started holding Wednesday-morning farmer meetings at the Trough, a restaurant that had once been Dale’s Dairy.

The wrong red hen

Naming the farm was easy. “We had a red hen who would lay eggs everywhere around, even in our cars,” Julie Peters told the Missoulian in 2018, “… and she was the smartest one. Foxes came and annihilated our entire flock, and she was hiding on the fence in the back, and she and one other chicken didn’t die, so we thought, ‘That tenacious, crazy little hen.’”

In June 2018 the name caused trouble. A restaurant called the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia, had asked White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave. Angry strangers online sent their messages to the Missoula farm instead. “We got messages that just were very unkind,” Peters said. “People wrote, like, ‘This is a bigoted place,’ ‘I’ll never go there again.’” Others wrote to thank the farm. “People don’t really look to see who they’re sending it to,” she said, “and how they might be affecting a business that really has nothing to do with it.” She added that “the only thing political that we’ve gotten involved with was saving farmland.”

Asked whether she and Greg planned to keep the name, Peters replied, “Heck, yeah.”