Ellms Family Farm — Attraction in Town of Ballston

We have been visiting this farm for years. It wasn't until this year that they started using Groupons so this was the first year that the farm was just chaos. We usually like this farm because it offers a nice relaxing day. This past weekend was not our normal experience there but we thought we would share it with other families so they might not make the same mistake as we did in going if there is a Groupon running.

I do understand that they want to drive attendance but that also requires a degree of organization that they were not prepared to handle. For example, our groupon (as we saw most patrons standing in line for ) entailed 2 free apple cider donuts. On a Saturday, they had ONE attendant working the register. The line was over 20 people long and each order was averaging three minutes. It took us 28 minutes in line (and it was cold out ) with kids, to get $1.90 worth of donuts. They should have had either more than one person working the register, or a line that was separate for people to cash in their groupon vouchers.

We also usually like the corn maze. This year it was littered with trash. If you are going to have that many people, there should be either A. no food / beverages allowed or B. Trash cans set up intermittently throughout the fields. We shouldn't be stepping on water bottles and dunkin donuts cups.

On the plus side, I do like some of the activities that they had set up that were newer from last year such as the baseball / football stations. They did have Jungle Jumparoos there ( we saw them on Shark tank so we were excited to try them ) but they were so deflated we couldn't use them. As in all of them - all five were deflated to the point of not being usable for the kids.

I would really like this farm to go back to the way it was, or get organized to handle the capacity. Not the best experience for our family and doubtful we would return if they have...

We visited here last weekend while in the area with our two children. First, it is overpriced for the available attractions. They do charge adults admission even though there is nothing for adults to do. We stayed maybe 2 hours and it was $60 for a few bouncing pads, slides, pedal cars, and climbing tires. The train ride was extra as were several other things. We have visited several farms that offer these types of attractions and this was by far the most expensive. My biggest complaint however is that we stood in line for a climbing attraction for 20 minutes only to be told at the front of the line that there was a minimum age of 6 to go on this attraction. Now, there was NO SIGN anywhere stating what age one needed to be. When I questioned the teenage employee about the lack of a sign, his response was "yeah they keep changing it, first it was 5, now it's 6". Ok, I understand for safety reasons why there are age restrictions, but this information was nowhere to be found and I had a disappointed 5 year old and 20 minutes of wasted time. This I find completely unprofessional and unacceptable. I had to help my older son out of a harness because none of the employees were paying attention. When we were about to walk away, one employee came running over and said "I'm sorry, I wasn't paying attention". Older kids were bouncing on the pillows with little kids and there appeared to be no limit to the number of kids they were letting on. Overall, very poorly run and we have been to MANY similar venues. We left early because of safety concerns and will not return again. It was not at all the fun experience we had been...

Love going here never had a bad experience untill this year while my 2 boys were trying to pick out a tree for Xmas. An employee came up and asked if we needed help we said no thank you just looking. He then walked behind us and kept following we asked for a few mins my son went to pick up a tree to see if it was full enough for him and the employee said let get that for you and we again said no thank you we are looking he then grabbed the tree from my son and brought it over to be wrapped and it is not the tree my boys wanted. I let him know they did not want that tree he then proceeded to get mad and follow us through the trees and got another employee to follow with him. We said can we please have some time he said sure and kept following us at that point my wife and I had enough of being followed and not allowing my boys to have the experience we were trying to give them we ended up going to bobs trees where we were not harassed and got a 9.5ft tree for about 40 bucks cheaper if that employee had given us the time we asked for multiple times elms for sure would have gotten the sale but we felt harassed and rushed and the employee had a bad attitude. Don't think I'll be returning for any events which kinda sucks since we love the fall events. Worst...