I visited the West Sussex pumpkin patch where you'll find giant pumpkins and a fun day out for the whole family

For farmer Caroline Harriott and her husband David, the tenant farmers at Lychpole Farm where Sompting Pumpkins is based, seeing families return year after year is the real joy of what they do.

Caroline said: “We’ve had people coming here since we opened and it’s become a lovely thing that family and friends do each year. We love seeing how the children have grown, and seeing people send us pictures of them with their pumpkins each year.”

Sompting Pumpkins will open to the public for a series of weekend openings from 10am to 4pm on October 4/5, October 11/12, and October 18/19 and will then open every day in October half term.

As in previous years, pumpkin-picking isn’t the only activity up at Sompting Pumpkins. When I visited this week, Caroline was getting the field ready for the sustainable craft tent and food stalls to be set up, as well as space for a face-painter, candle-seller and more.

All the food and crafts will have an autumn/pumpkin/scary theme, from pumpkin on pizzas to ghostly candles.

New for this year is pumpkin stickers, which children can you to put on their pumpkin to decorate it, instead of carving it straight away. This way, the pumpkin can be kept for much longer.

There will also be new pedal tractors for children to have a go on.

And children can also walk the Sompting Pumpkins sheep – Ramona, Vincent and Tiny Tina.

Caroline added: “Pumpkins are beautiful decorations that are there for carving, if you want to, but they're also great for eating. Spending time up in the picking patch makes you feel good, it makes people smile, and it’s a lovely, traditional day out.”

Based at the 1,000-acre Lychpole Farm just off the A27, Sompting Pumpkins offers 25 different varieties of pumpkins to pick. Around 50,000 seeds were planted in the first week of June, to ensure the pumpkins were ready for the thousands of visitors who flock there every October.

This year, the long hot summer gave Caroline and the team a ‘nerve-wracking’ wait for the pumpkins to grow to a decent size, but she said when the rain came at the end of August onwards it allowed them to flourish.

As I walked through the fields this week, hundreds of huge and small pumpkins in different shapes, sizes and colours filled the landscape.

There is also a gorgeous field of sunflowers, planted to allow bees to prosper and help with pollination, but which will be used as a maze for families picking pumpkins.

Caroline and family are keen to make Sompting Pumpkins different from other experiences by using the opportunity to teach visitors about farming. On the tractor and trailer ride, for which riders are asked to make a donation to Chestnut Tree House children’s hospice, Caroline shows them the other fields at Lychpole and explains crop rotations and the type of livestock they have.

On Saturday, October 11, to mark World Mental Health Day, all donations from trailer rides will go to West Sussex Mind.

Caroline added: "We love being able to get people up here, to see what we do and educate them about farming. We can show them they wheat and barley we grow, and how and why we rotate which field we grow the pumpkins in. We tell them a story so they feel like they’ve gone home knowing more and having good value for money.”

Caroline is also passionate about teaching people how to use pumpkins in cookery, proving information on which pumpkins work best in which types of dishes and recipes.

She added: “Of course, our main aim is to sell pumpkins, but we want it to be about so much more than that. We hope people come away having had a wholesome experience, having learned something and had a fun, family experience.”

For more information on Sompting Pumpkins, see the website.