We went pumpkin picking | White House Farm, Norwich

Okay, I admit it. I’m easily influenced. We usually just buy our yearly pumpkins from Morrisons or Sainsburys or something, but the stream of pumpkin picking photos all over Instagram got me keen on a trip beyond the supermarket this year.

I thought I would pop up the photos in a blog post, since I seem to do an awful lot of jabbering on about the things I do while travelling, but hardly ever mention things I do or places I go when I’m at home in Norfolk. There’s a lot of good stuff in my home county, so it’s probably time I started showing it off a bit more.

After no research whatsoever, we settled on White House Farm, because it was one of the first names I saw on a quick google of ‘pumpkin picking norfolk’, and because we wanted somewhere close without the need to drive for hours.

White House Farm was a) super cute, and b) super close to the city centre. I think it took us about 20 minutes to drive there from our flat in Norwich, and that’s with busy Saturday afternoon traffic. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of it before, but then again I am a pretty rubbish Norwich resident in the sense that many of the city’s best kept secrets seem to pass me by, so it’s probably not that surprising.

It won me over before we were even properly there, mostly because of this sign:

So Norfolk. I love it.

We parked up and moseyed through the little café and farm shop, and then emerged out into the farm behind it to see pumpkins galore, lying on the grass in all their orange glory and piled high in crates and trailers. Naturally, we weren’t just going to select one here and be done with it, so out into the pumpkin field we went (after acquiring a wheelbarrow, of course).

I was initially a little disappointed – won’t someone please think of the Instagram photos?! – that the pumpkins that were left in the field itself were basically all green, since all the orange ones had been picked and moved to other areas of the farm.  Still, not everyone lives their life according to what looks pretty on the grid, I guess, so what can you do – it was also the first Saturday of half term and we’d arrived in the afternoon, so probably not at the ideal time to be choosy!

We’d been wheeling the barrow around the field and examining the pumpkins for a few minutes when we spied the finest green pumpkin I ever did see. Naturally he was pretty much the biggest in the field because we like to be dramatic and he was also the PERFECT shape. We lugged him into the barrow and wheeled around some more in the sun, before heading out of the field itself to select an orange one to go with him. It was another enormous one, so we ended up spending £9 on two pumpkins, but considering the size of them it was pretty reasonable.

I’m a bad blogger and didn’t bother perfecting a wondrously autumnal *look* to wear in amongst the pumpkins – it would have been a disaster to attempt to shoot outfit photos anyway, since it was horrendously windy, there were a lot of kids running around, and a lot of people generally. Still, can we please take a moment for the sleeves on this lilac Primark jumper?! Nothing makes me happy like a big sleeve at this time of year.

We ended our little excursion (once we’d dropped the pumpkins off in the car because oh man they were heavy) with a wander in the farm shop, and picked up a bunch of carrots and a couple of parsnips. We roasted them the next day – is that peak autumn or what?!

It was one of my favourite days of the season yet – and one of my favourite examples of the things you do ‘for the gram’ just turning out to be things you do for you. I’ll definitely be going pumpkin picking again next year, and Rob and I want to start going to White House Farm every couple of months to pick other things too – it looks like they have lots of different things you can pick depending on the season.

Now we just need to think what to carve into our spoils. Last year we did Game of Thrones (a direwolf one and ‘Winter is coming’ one) and the year before that we did Pokemon (a Pikachu and a Charmander). I can’t wait to get a scented candle burning, pop something on TV in the background, and carve them up with a big mug of tea.

Have you been pumpkin picking this year? And what do you think should be on our list of possibilities for this year’s carve up?

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