Good Gourd Sunnyfields Farm has pumped up its pumpkin performance with a Halloween attraction that’s now a family ritual outing to remember. Breaking its own Guinness World Record for this type of display, 10,000 pumpkins and squashes feature a spectacular mosaic of Sir David Attenborough. Spread over a slope into a pyramid design the icon for the artwork was chosen in a social media poll. Now a new indoor, walk-through experience Dark Harvest has also been built on the farm’s site in Totton, Hampshire offering a more ghoulish getaway resistant to rain and wind with spooky clowns, scary foggy mazes, a DJ and a waterfall.
Beyond those immediate thrills, customers can grab a wheelbarrow and stock up on the produce, formally classified as fruits because of their seeds, throughout the season. Carvings are best composted while local pig farms benefit from leftovers. As uncertain times drive public interest in the uncanny, the farm’s October Pumpkin Time, outweighs Christmas drawing over 90,000 visitors, mostly within a 25-minute drive time. Tickets are from £7.50 and specifically priced to be as affordable as possible.
All year there’s a café, butchery and shop selling over 100 local products including a large organic selection and eco-refills for milk and washing liquids. Started by Ian and Sarah Nelson 36 years ago who met when working in Africa they got going in farming back home thanks to a £1,000 Prince’s Trust (now King’s Trust) grant that funded their first tractor. Now son Tom takes the lead. Making a living in agriculture is harder than ever so “you have to be as versatile as a Swiss Army knife, our flat organisational structure enables quick decisions and planning long term”, he explains.
In the last four years sales of meat, produced by local farms, have grown 25 percent annually while the scalable and inspired model, adopted by the Nelsons a decade ago after they did a display that struck a chord with a few thousand pumpkins, has led to healthy returns. A £4million turnover is forecast for 2026/27 and £5million for 2028 as Pumpkin Time delivers 40 percent of revenues and almost all Sunnyfields’ profit. The majority has been reinvested over the years in to physical infrastructure maximising the site’s space and visual opportunities.
With active trading doing the heavy lifting money-wise and the Nelsons acutely aware about resilience, trade diversity is a priority. A team of 30 is complemented by 150 seasonal hires including specialist scare actors contributing to Dark Harvest. “Over the years we have given over 500 local young people their first start in the world of work,” adds Tom now working on new events and whose culinary preference is for a variety of winter squash with flesh that when baked that separates into spellbinding noodle-like strands. www.sunnyfields.co.uk
