Growing your own pumpkins as easy as pie, says Gráinne

IT may have been the years she spent trying to cut the centre out of turnips that finally drove Gráinne Foran-Taylor to experiment with pumpkins.

But the Co Waterford woman, who has a vibrant pumpkin patch on her land in Ballyduff, believes her real inspiration came from years of watching pumpkins flourish in huge fields when she lived in upstate New York.

“I would tell my neighbours that I used to cut up turnips at Hallowe’en and they’d die laughing,” the mother-of-two joked. “How can anyone get the middle out of a turnip, it’s so laborious.”