Anti-waste Pumpkin Party

in St Ives Community Orchard 3 – 6pm on Saturday, 4th November

There will be live music with The Tinners Session, pumpkin crafts activities, pumpkin games, pumpkin food and a treasure hunt.
Witches will be stirring up a big pot of magic brew over a fire and the Orchard bar will be serving mulled, spiced hot cider.

The Foodshare group are encouraging people to cook up their Halloween pumpkins and bring up some of their pumpkin dishes to share in a potluck meal in the orchard. Or to bring up carved pumpkins to decorate the orchard for the party and orchard volunteers will put them into their compost bins afterwards.
There will also be a information about the orchard’s community composting project.

The group hopes this event will inspire local residents to eat their pumpkins this year and help make this delicious food go further. You can get an average of six meals out of a pumpkin and they make delicious soup, curry, pumpkin fritters, burgers and can also be used in sweet pies and cakes.

Fancy dress is encouraged for this Halloween after party, and there will be a costume swap rail to exchange costumes so people can grab next year’s one if they want. Witches, wizards, ghosts, pumpkins, skeletons, zombies, fairies are all invited to come play in the spooky orchard. But please DON’T go out and buy any fancy dress outfits – scary amounts of polyester, plasticky fancy dress items are thrown away every year – only reuse, share, upcycle, make your own or find in charity shops.

Isn’t it weird that 15.8 million pumpkins will go to waste this Halloween, carved but not eaten? That’s enough for 95 million meals! The humble pumpkin is meant to be eaten, but this is often overshadowed by its role as a Jack o’ Lantern – in fact, many people still don’t know carving pumpkins are edible. Now that you do, are you ready to eat yours?

Please use #EatYourPumpkin when posting on social media about this event and tag @stivesfoodshare and @hellohubbub too.

More info on https://hubbub.org.uk/eat-your-pumpkinu
Thanks to Hubbub for funding this event.