Ludwigsburg Pumpkin Festival

 

Pumpkins and a palace? Here, in Germany!? When I found out about this fest last week, I was determined to make the trip. Happy to say, yesterday, we visited Ludwigsburg Palace for the largest pumpkin festival in the world.  With over 400,000 pumpkins ranging from blue banana pumpkins and red kuri squash, to everything in between (nearly 450 varieties), we had a fantastic day exploring the elegant palace grounds for this year's theme "Royal".

 

 In addition to  thousands of gourds for sale, the palace gardens are full of pumpkin sculptures, and NONE of the pumpkins are painted. Did you know that there really are white, gray, and black pumpkins? I had no idea!

Pumpkins are shipped from countries all over the world for the fest, and pumpkin products of every sort are sold (such as pumpkin ketchup, pumpkin pesto, pumpkin chutney, and more). I so badly wanted pumpkin soup, but the rain came and we hopped in a restaurant to wait out the rain and ate from the menu there which did not have any pumpkin. A few minutes after leaving the restaurant to continue our adventure through the gardens, smells of pumpkin soup, pumpkin spaghetti, and more flooded my nose. Shoot! We missed a giant fest tent with a menu of nothing but awesome pumpkin concoctions that smelled so delicious I contemplated eating again.

The largest pumpkins in the world are also at this fest, some with weights over 2000 pounds! Can you imagine?

Aside from all the pumpkins, the palace grounds have a wonderul playground for kids, a boat ride, and a large fairy tale village complete with a maze at the end. The kids never wanted to leave. Neither did we!

For me, these little gourd people scenes they had set up were my favorite. Too cute. Can you believe those hands and arms? They are made from gourd stems! 

 

Tonight I do believe we'll be having some butternut squash soup and decorating our pumpkins we bought from the fest.