Rates/Discounts

General Admission
Adults: $6.00
Children 12 & Under: $5.00

Special Rates/Discounts
Family Rate: $25 maximum for parents and their own school-aged children.
Groups of 10 or more: $5 per person
4 years old and younger: Free with paid parent/adult admission
80 years and over: Free, with our congratulations!
Note: Only one discount may be applied per person.

Parking
Free!!

A note to the curious…
“Why does it cost anything at all? It’s just fun in a cornfield.”

A lot goes into making a corn maze.

The biggest single, easy-to-point-to expense in creating a corn maze is getting the corn to grow. That includes plowing, harrowing, fertilizing, and planting the corn. Even on this little 4 acre patch of corn, these things take time, they take fuel, they take a remarkable array of very expensive machinery and equipment, and they all have to happen months before any income is received for the effort.

Then there is the cost of insurance. One year, about 20% of the price of admission went to insurance. This is probably the most peculiar and frustrating expense because you hope you don’t ever “use” it!

Of course, there are taxes too. The taxes on the ground under the corn maze increased by about 40% in 2005, and the taxes have gone up for the last two years as well. That’s not because the corn maze business is booming; it’s because land for houses is worth more than it used to be. Our cornfield may be more valuable as a building site for houses, but it sure is more fun as a maze. Your visiting this and other Connecticut corn mazes supports farming and open space in Connecticut.

Creating the maze itself—the paths—costs money too. To make the maze without herbicides, and yet to keep plant growth (weeds) on the paths down, we establish the design that is the paths using long rolls (over 2 miles in total) of something called plastic mulch. The cost for that runs about $500. We’ve looked into a number of methods, but this one seems the best for now. Beside the designing itself, laying out the plastic takes about 40 hours… and then another 6 or so to pull the plastic out, and then perhaps 6 more to cut back the corn that likes to send its leaves into the sunny gaps and generally tidy things up.

Then there is the research involved in creating the questions and answers, one part of what makes Merrow Maze unique. Mostly this means time reading and talking to people and phone calls and Internet research. But it also means taking time writing things—writing them so that the experts that happen by aren’t troubled by inaccuracies or oversimplifications, and so that the general public isn’t overwhelmed with information, confused, or turned off!

And while you may just click on a link, websites cost money and take time to create as well!