Pumpkin Picking at Jersey Girls

The ice cream here comes from the Jersey herd grazing the same farm, which tells you the kind of place it is: a working dairy at Bury that opens its field and its barn for a week at the end of October.

Pumpkin picking runs as booked sessions of about an hour rather than open gates. Within your hour you pick your pumpkin out in the field and then carve it in the farm's spooky barn, so it goes home finished and the scooping happens somewhere easy to clean. Sessions run daily from Saturday 24 October to Saturday 31 October, listed date by date, and numbers on each one are limited.

The ticketing is unusual and worth understanding before you book. Tickets are sold per pumpkin rather than per person, and each pumpkin picker can bring up to two additional visitors. So a family of three needs one ticket if only one child is picking, while a family where two children each want their own pumpkin needs two. Tickets are non-refundable, so check the date carefully before you pay.

There is a grown-ups version as well. Pumpkins and Prosecco, billed as a Carve and Sip, runs on the evening of Friday 30 October and lasts an hour and a half.

Parking on the farm is free, and booking is done online through the farm's own shop and tickets site rather than at the gate.