I read about one of the big pumpkin farms in Brandenburg that they exhibit about 100.000 pumpkins, 500 different kinds, some weighing only 35 grams. Some of them are for sale, and dishes with pumpkin can be sampled in a bakery, a café, and a restaurant, where goose raised on the premises can also be sampled. And with joyrides for children.

Spargelhof Klaistow, Glindower Straße 28, 14547, in case anyone wants to visit – this is the last weekend, but I am sure they will be back next year, and are in any case doing something similar during asparagus season. Easily reached on RE1 and bus 641 (but keep an eye on the schedule – the bus only runs hourly).

I thought that might add some welcome splashes of colour on a grey and misty day, and also provide some images I would need for a photography course, illustrating the abundance in this part of the world in contrast to the abject deprivation elsewhere, so off I went to Beelitz.

I was prepared for mountains of pumpkin – not for the way they had been built into tasteless figures and the sight of all that food simply rotting.