Pumpkin Picking at Bradshaws Farm Shop

Paying by weight is what shapes a visit here. You book a slot, walk the patch picking whatever pumpkins and squash you want, then weigh the lot at the end and pay for what you have gathered. Nothing is priced before you choose it, so one large carving pumpkin or a basket of small squash are both perfectly reasonable ways to go about it.

The patch is planted with pumpkins and squash in a range of sizes, shapes and colours, grown for carving, for cooking and for sitting on a doorstep through the autumn. Slots start every thirty minutes and run for an hour, which is enough time to walk the rows without feeling hurried and keeps arrivals spread through the day.

Booking is online only, so this is not somewhere to arrive on the day and hope. The charge to book covers a vehicle rather than each person, which keeps the cost the same whether two of you come or six.

The patch sits alongside Bradshaws Farm Shop and Garden Centre at Prospect Farm on the A6 bypass at Garstang, so the shop is there before or after your hour in the field, and pumpkins are sold ready-picked inside for anyone who would rather skip the field altogether. The farm's own advice is to bring the whole family and wrap up warm, which is worth taking seriously for an October hour in an open Lancashire field.