Pumpkin Picking at Secretts, Milford, Surrey

Secretts is a long established Surrey farm shop, butchers, florist, wine merchant and pick your own at Hurst Farm in Milford, and Pumpkin Week is the event the place is best known for. It is a proper structured event rather than a field with a gate on it, and it is prebooked only, which keeps the crowd size manageable in a way the big Sussex festivals do not attempt. The £8.50 ticket is the whole framework of the day: it gets you in, gives you a scavenger hunt sheet for the Halloween trail, opens the pumpkin field and enters you into the fancy dress competition. The trail is a genuine walk, 15 to 20 minutes each way, which is worth knowing if you are carrying a toddler.

Almost everything else is a £3 add on bought on the day, and the list is short and sensible rather than endless: a magic show, a haunted house, mini pedal tractors, biscuit decorating and glitter tattoos, plus crafts, marshmallow toasting and face painting. Food is where Secretts pulls ahead of most patches, because it has a working kitchen rather than a catering van. Expect pumpkin curry, pumpkin soup, BBQ sausages, pumpkin cake and pick and mix lunchboxes from the Secretts Kitchen, with guest traders including Crumpy's Smoke Shack, Waffle on a Stick and The Coffee Can. Two awkward facts to get straight before you book.

Dogs are not allowed at all, which catches people out at a farm venue. And the pumpkin field itself is not suitable for wheelchairs or mobility scooters, with uneven terrain that gets worse in wet weather. Parking is free and plentiful, but you must use the Chapel Lane entrance, because the Squires Garden Centre entrance is closed during the event.