The pumpkin patch

Sunday 21st October

Call us naive, but we thought that pumpkins were pretty much pumpkins and that there were bigger ones for carving and marginally smaller ones for eating.  How very wrong we were!  The season of Fall, which will culminate with Thanksgiving, has seen a positive proliferation of gourds of all shapes and sizes springing up wherever you look.  There are huge ones balanced on hay bales at the end of drives.  There are carved ones springing up along drives.  There are towers of them balanced around doorways like bay trees to welcome you.  There are gooseneck ones artfully curving around mail boxes and fences.  There are green ones, white ones, orange ones, knobby ones, smooth ones, small ones, large ones, stripy ones, spotty ones - in fact it is fair to say - it is gourd - tastic.

Eager to join in the gourd fun, we headed to the attractively named Milky Way farm (http://www.milkywayfarm.com/) to visit their pumpkin patch and choose our own.  The farm is set in rolling countryside which was all very reminiscent of the home counties.  We started with a foray into the maize maze and spent a pleasant half an hour lost among the tall stalks entertained by the farming quiz.  A short stroll across fields to the pumpkin patch, and we were in gourd heaven selecting from hundreds of pumpkins.  A lot of discussion - not one which was bruised, not one which was too elongated, not one which was too scarred - finally two suitable carvers were chosen and a novelty "peanut" pumpkin for the mantelpiece.   We loaded our pumpkins into the hay wagon and headed back to the farm.  Much drier than last time we visited a pumpkin patch 3 years ago!

The day was topped off by ice-cram from the creamery.  In my opinion it is the best ice-cream so far on this side of the Atlantic although the grown ups were marginally let down by choosing the seasonal pumpkin (which of course really meant cinnamon).  Delicious peanut butter caramel, rocky road and coconut though (what is it with the children and coconut flavoured ice-cream?).  We will definitely be back for that again.

I am still not sure how I feel about the environmental impact of all these gourds - surely the land could / should have been used for growing food?  I can't deny though that the houses do all look great.