The longest-running fall tradition on Long Island starts Saturday. Hicks Nurseries opens its 51st annual Fall Festival on September 12, and the Westbury garden center that has been selling plants to Long Islanders since 1853 has spent the summer building new things to show for it, including an indoor garden that appears to have been claimed by a family of skeletons.

The festival runs through November 1 at 100 Jericho Turnpike, and the frame of the thing has not changed in five decades: parking is free, admission is free, and most of what is inside, from the pumpkin displays to the walkthrough story to the photo ops, is free too. What changes each year is the layer on top, and this year that layer is bigger than usual.

A skeleton family and a market of little shops

The headline addition for year 51 is the Skeleton Estate Garden, a new indoor display garden filled with fall plants and seasonal blooms where the residents happen to be skeletons. It is built as a walk-through, family-friendly space, part garden inspiration and part Halloween set, and it is open every day of the festival.

The other new construction is the Fall Festival Market, which breaks the seasonal shopping into a cluster of small themed shops. Harvest Moon Market carries the fall decorating stock. Boo-tique is the Halloween room, decor and apparel. The Toy Shoppe covers the youngest visitors. The one worth a detour is Botanical Curiosities, a shop of strange and spooky plants that leans into carnivorous varieties, which is the kind of thing a six-generation nursery can pull off that a pop-up pumpkin lot cannot.

Otto is still on the schedule

Every institution needs a mascot, and Hicks has had the same one since the 1970s. Otto the Ghost greets visitors on weekends and holidays through the festival, from 10 a.m. to noon and 1 to 4 p.m., and by now the adults lining up their kids for the photo were the kids in the photo themselves. Otto also stars in the animated Halloween walkthrough story, a Hicks fixture that gets a new plot every year and runs daily from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. The nursery asks visitors to bring a non-perishable food item and drop it at the end of the story path for its annual Long Island Cares drive, which is about the gentlest admission price on Long Island.

The food is its own tradition. The Country Market is open daily with cider donuts, homemade pies, Hicks fudge, kettle corn and apple cider, and on weekends and holidays the food truck comes out along with the roasted corn stand, which the nursery will tell you serves the best roasted corn on Long Island and which has enough repeat customers to make the claim hard to test.

What costs money, and what it costs

Two things carry a charge. The hay maze is $8 a person for unlimited runs, free for ages two and under, open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. And on weekends and school holidays there is an all-access children's wristband, $30 at the register or $25 for members of the nursery's Advantage program, which bundles the hay maze with three take-home crafts: a glowing nightlight, a potted mum and a decorated pumpkin. Everything else on the grounds is free, which for a family comparing this against a ticketed fall attraction is the whole argument.

Two dates worth circling

Two one-day events sit inside the festival's seven-week run. On Sunday, October 4, the Giant Pumpkin Weigh Off returns, with entries accepted from 10 to 10:45 a.m. and judging at 11. The three heaviest pumpkins take $500, $300 and $200, there is a $100 Rookie of the Year prize, and any child 15 or under who grew a pumpkin, of any size, can bring it for a shot at a $50 prize and a certificate. Backyard growers with an August surprise still have almost a month to feed it.

On Wednesday, October 14, the pet parade takes over, registration at 4 p.m. and the parade at 5. There are more than $600 in gift-card prizes across six categories, from best overall costume to best child-and-pet pairing, and every entrant gets a ribbon. The nursery collects pet food and supplies at the event for Long Island Cares' pet pantry.

Fifty-one Octobers in

The festival's scale makes more sense against the scale of the place running it. Hicks is in its 172nd year on the same stretch of Jericho Turnpike, run by the sixth generation of the same family, and this year Garden Center magazine ranked it the number two independent garden center in all of North America. The nursery that moved full-grown trees onto Gold Coast estates in the 1900s and bred the Hicks Yew that landscapers still plant everywhere now spends its autumn running a free festival with a resident ghost.

The grounds are open daily from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. at 100 Jericho Turnpike in Westbury, with festival activities running 10 to 5. Details and wristbands are at hicksnurseries.com or 516-334-0066. Outdoor activities are weather permitting. For most of Nassau County this is a drive of twenty minutes, it costs nothing to walk in, and it is the last year of Otto's first half-century, which feels like the right one not to skip.