Drive past Abma's Farm on Lawlins Road this week and you'll catch it mid-shift. The tomato rows are thinning out. The potato digging that's been quietly running all August is on its last legs. The hayride wagons that pull people out to the pumpkin patch every fall are parked, empty, waiting for a start date that hasn't arrived yet. If you showed up expecting pumpkin season, you'd be a month early. If you showed up expecting peak summer produce, you'd already be a little late.
That gap is the actual story right now, not the farm stand photos everyone posts in October once the corn maze opens. For about five or six weeks, Wyckoff runs on two calendars at once: one at the farm, quietly resetting crop by crop, and one on Franklin Avenue, where the restaurant lineup has genuinely changed shape over the past year. Neither shift gets much attention because neither one looks dramatic from the outside. But if you live here, this stretch between late August and the pumpkin patch opening is when the town is actually doing something, not just waiting for fall.
The U-Pick Calendar Nobody Reads Closely
Abma's Farm has worked this land on Lawlins Road since 1929, when Barney Abma started what's now a fourth-generation operation, and it still runs out of a Dutch barn that predates the business itself by more than a century. It's also, according to the farm and to VisitNJ, the only produce and egg farm left in Bergen County. That alone makes its rhythms worth paying attention to, because there's nowhere else nearby keeping the same kind of calendar.
Here's what that calendar actually looks like right now:
| U-Pick Crop | Typical Window | Status as of late August |
|---|---|---|
| Flowers | July through late September | Still open, closing soon |
| Vegetables (tomatoes, eggplant, peppers) | July through August | Winding down |
| Potatoes | August | Final days |
| Pumpkins | Late September through October | Not yet open |
Nobody plans a farm visit around this table, which is exactly why it's worth knowing. The last two weeks of August are the only stretch where summer picking is nearly done and pumpkin season hasn't started. If you want tomatoes or potatoes you dug yourself, this is close to your last shot. If you're already thinking about the hayride and pumpkin patch combo, the farm's own birthday party page notes those packages don't open until mid-September and run Fridays and Saturdays only through October, with a strong recommendation to book at least four months ahead. That's not a suggestion aimed at procrastinators. It's a reflection of how narrow the actual window is once you account for weekends only, over six weeks, for a farm this popular.
The Dinner You Have to Book Before You Know You Want It
The other thing happening at Abma's right now has nothing to do with produce. Tucked inside the market is a Tomasello Winery tasting room, where a flight was running sixteen dollars a person as of last fall, a low-key addition that turns a farm stand run into something closer to an afternoon out. It's a smaller commitment than the farm's other fall draw: a handful of farm-to-table dinners hosted by Josh and Valerie Abma, built around a multi-course menu from the farm's kitchen, a wine room tasting to start, and live music through the evening. These aren't a standing weekly event. They happen only a few times a year, and by most accounts they sell out months in advance.
That timing matters more than it sounds. If you're the kind of resident who likes the idea of a farm dinner in October, the decision window isn't October. It's now, before the pumpkin patch crowds even show up, while there's still a chance at a seat.
Franklin Avenue Isn't the Same Strip It Was Last Year
Downtown, the shift is less seasonal and more structural. A handful of names on Franklin Avenue are newer than most residents may have clocked, and together they change what a Tuesday night or a Saturday brunch actually looks like here.
- La Cambusa moved into Wyckoff after more than twenty-five years serving Southern Italian food in Fair Lawn, Ridgewood, and Garfield, bringing a full-service BYO menu built around Amalfi Coast-style seafood and handmade pasta, open for dinner Wednesday through Sunday.
- Willow & Whisk, sitting in the Boulder Run Shopping Center across from Stop & Shop, has built a reputation as a genuine brunch destination, ranked #46 on Yelp's Top 100 Brunch Spots list in 2024, known for its cacio e pepe scrambled eggs and a dining room with high ceilings and a lot of natural light.
- Wyckoff Tavern, at 315 Franklin Ave, has settled into the strip as a full American tavern menu with a full bar, the kind of place built for a burger and a beer as easily as a bigger group dinner.
- Graze Craze, a charcuterie shop that's also positioning itself as an event space, recently opened in town, adding a category of business Franklin Avenue didn't have before.
None of these are one-off pop-ups. They're a full-service Italian restaurant with a two-decade track record elsewhere, a nationally ranked brunch spot, a settled-in American tavern, and a new retail-and-event concept, all sitting on the same strip at the same time. That's a different downtown than the one that existed a couple of years ago, even if no single opening made headlines on its own.
What This Overlap Actually Means If You Live Here
Put the farm calendar and the Franklin Avenue lineup next to each other and the pattern is clearer than either one on its own. Wyckoff, a town of roughly 16,000 residents, doesn't have a single big seasonal moment where everything changes at once. It has two smaller ones, running on different clocks, that happen to overlap right now. The farm is finishing one set of crops and hasn't opened its next one. The downtown restaurant scene has already turned over, but most of that turnover happened quietly enough that a lot of longtime residents are only catching up to it this month.
If you're deciding how to spend the next six weekends, that overlap is the actual opportunity. Get the last of the U-pick tomatoes before the rows close out. Book the farm dinner or the Tomasello tasting before the pumpkin crowds arrive and the parking lot gets harder to deal with. Try La Cambusa or Willow & Whisk before "new restaurant in Wyckoff" stops being an accurate description and just becomes the way things are. The pumpkin patch and the corn maze will still be there in October, the same as always. This particular stretch, where the farm calendar is between seasons and the downtown lineup is still settling in, doesn't repeat until next year.
If you're weighing a move to a town like this one, that kind of texture, a working farm with a four-generation history a few minutes from a downtown that's genuinely refreshing its restaurant lineup, is hard to pick up from a listing photo. It's the kind of detail Amy Bourque walks buyers through when they're trying to understand what daily life in a specific Bergen County town actually feels like, not just what the median price says. If Wyckoff is on your list or you're weighing it against a few other towns nearby, reach out for a conversation grounded in the neighborhood, not just the numbers.
