Giant Maize Maze + Cherry & Fruit Picking 2011

event :: Maize Maze + Cherry Picking 2011
date :: 30th + 31st July 2011
venue :: Ansty PYO Farm Salisbury + Court Farm and Leisure, Tillington, UK
theme :: blue + pink

[1] We went to Ansty PYO last year during our sunflower trip hunting with Adee+Leen, Kak Mahani+family, Kak Keen+family, but we were a little too late (they're close at 4pm on Sundays). So this time around, we made a morning visit instead. In fact, we were here during the first weekend the maize maze is open. kiasu eh? It was also just 2 days before Ramadhan. The target of the maze is to reach this 'Circle' point at the centre of the maze.




[2] We were the first one to arrived. Followed closely by Farah/Imran. Kak Wan+family joined next, but Kak Keen+family arrived rather late because Abg Zahar were working that night, and sadly they didn't have time to explore the maize maze. while waiting for the others to arrive, i did a bit of strawberry picking. even though they said that there were not many strawberries left, still managed to pick some large and sweet ones ;)




[3] The entrance fee to the maize maze is £4/pax. We were given puzzles handout and instructions on playing (so you can enjoy the maze to its fullest) by the maize maze designer herself! the maze wasn't just a simple maze. they're many checkpoints you have to look for inside the maze that will help you find clues and solve the puzzles. if you complete, you'll get a lollipop! hehe. The puzzles to be completed were around 3 pages worth! we decided to teamwork with sofea seeing that the were too many to solve. hehe.




[4] for some puzzles, we even got help from the rest of the gang during lunch. trust me, there were quite a number of tough ones, probably the toughest one is the part where you need to name a game starting with each letter of the ABC. alhamdulillah, we managed to get it all sorted. i remembered that farah was cheating and doing a lot of copying (oops the secret is out :P) because she was busy taking photo in the maze rather than finding the clues/puzzles. we were supposed to only get 1 lollipod for each submission, but they gave all the kids (plus a few adults like myself and farah..hehe) a lollipop each instead! yay!




[5] The maize maze is not just some random design. Instead, the maze is shaped into a number of objects such as bicycle, pencil, guitar, waffle, etc. hubbykun showed me Lady gaga's song video 'You and I'. the place where she was playing the piano is in a maize maze! cool! Hubbykun said, the maze also remind him of M. Night Syhamalan's 'The Sign' movie :) (I have never watched this movie because I hate too much ghost/thriller movies.. why do people enjoy this unheatlhy hobby? can take years of your life, I tell you :P)




[6] What's the name of the game? (automatically my head is singing this Abba song that was my favourite song during our recent trip. i like! although hubbykun was making fun of me when I was singing this because he said my voice is super high pitched especially at this line :P). Oh back to the story-telling: this game is called 'splat the rat!'. basically 2 persons are required to play. 1 is standing at the higher end of the pipe, and will drop down mini-coconut down the pipe. While the person at the end has a bat and were suppose to hit to coconut. Sofea was manning the coconut, while I was manning the bat. No wonder nobody has tried me on for baseball. have no skill whatsoever in this department. barely managed to hit 1 coconut out of ~10 sofea dropped :P the sound of the coconut rolling down the pipe was really weird. when the checkpoint wasn't visible yet, when I heard it, I first thought that it was this tribe-like big-pipe musical instrument (not sure what its call). Oh also, I heard people talking in Malay while we were taking pictures inside the maze near here. I think we must have made the maze very lively with all our loud talking and laughing that day ;)




[7] Playing jenga. My first time playing such a huge model ;) be aware that in the picture a lot of side actors who weren't playing though. It was really fun + challenging to be playing this when you have more players. We even came here a 2nd time after lunch with Min + Sofea because we wanna play a second round. hubbykun was the time keeper, and only allowed us 10 minutes to play (party pooper!). The reason was because we were heading to another destination after that.




[8] Argh i can't seem to remember this word puzzle game. You're given 9 letters drawn in squares and you need to find as many words possible with it within 5 minutes. But an additional rule is the letters chosen for the word must be connected to each other in the square. Kak Wan was an expert in this game. When Farah and I were playing, we simply chose any words without caring about this (we weren't cheating ok, it's because we both don't know the rule of the game. wasn't stated on the board).




[9] We were amazed that the final target i.e. 'The Circle' wasn't merely a checkpoint, but equipped with a number of games such as jenga, football (must target ball inside the holes), tic tac toe, etc. We spent a bit of time trying out all the games. There were also this happy kids + puzzleman photo booth area ;)




[10] we missed a number of checkpoints (need to locate all to find the puzzle clues), so we had to try a different routes to locate them. by the time we finished finding all the clues, it was just in time for lunch! our picnic menu that day: nasi lemak (kak kin), mac & cheese (kak wan), fried keow teow (farah), err believe it or not i cant remember what i brought! i think it was fried noodle (rather insignificant seeing that  it was inferior to the rest of the dishes others brought :P our limited cooking skills are legendary keke)




[11] kak keen + family posing at the strawberry picking area. so sorry that you guys didn't have time to try to maize maze. but on the bright side, they didn't get their pants + shoes dirty either. it was raining in the morning, so the maze track were rather muddy. thank god for washing machine.




[12] No trip is complete without a group picture of the gang of course. We had a lot of fun here, kudos to all Ansty PYO staff. After the photo session, farah+imran left to head to their weekend getaway destination in Birmingham. The rest of us then headed to next destination, a castle + gardens that kak keen recommended.




[13] We journeyed only half way to the castle, but cancelled the trip when we find out that by the time we reached there will be after 5.30pm i.e. the place will be closed. Kak Keen mislooked, thought that it will take 30 minutes away from Ansty, but according to the GPS it was 1 hour journey. so we stopped the car at the side of the road and discussed what to do.




[14] Kak Keen + family invited all of us to come over to their home for dinner that night. Kak Wan helped to buy some ingradients, while Dr Azwan was the special chef for the day ;) Since it was still early, we kidnapped Min and Anis to go to the 'Flowers of Hatch' (flowers PYO) for a quick visit, before meeting the rest back at kak keen's home.




[15] again the sunflower maze wasn't ready (the same situation as last year). we were told by the owner that they had problem with pigeon and had to resow them, about a month time from the day we visit. since that will fall in the month Ramadhan/ busy times during Eid celebration, we never got a chance to visit this either. i wonder why sunflowers seemed to not be doing very well at a lot of places this year. there were some flowers that cant be picked. we saw the owner, who does this more of a hobby rather than business. told us that the flower farm/garden has been a rather busy for a couple of weeks due to wedding bookings.




[16] dinner at kak keen's. The first course was grilled chicken, mashed potato + gravy, yorkshire pudding, sweet corn (remind me of kenny roger's meal). We didn't know until we were full with the 1st course that abg zahar/Dr Azwan also were waiting for the steamed fish to be ready! hubbykun was teasing that Abg Zahar was busy serving others the first course because he wanted to enjoy the steamed fish all by himself :P Also, it happened that today was also Kak Wan's birthday eve! so the dinner session was like an unplanned birthday celebration too ;) Happy belated birthday Kak Wan!




[17] The next day (Sunday), we went to Courts Farm in Tillington, located about 1.5 hrs away from Bristol. We found out about this farm from other Malaysians who have been here a few weeks back for cherry picking. We have never tried cherry picking before, so I was really looking forward to it.




[18] When we first arrived, I saw a few pretty white goats in their pen near the car park. You are allowed to pet them. The goats were very friendly and loved the attention. A water pipe is prepared nearby to wash your hands. [In this picture: giant croquette].




[19] We were amazed of the sheer size of this farm. Hubbykun and I were in unison that this is perhaps the best PYO farm we have been to since. There were a variety of fruits and vegetables for you to try picking on your own. The carrot PYO was really cute, there was a tiny shovel prepared. We didn't try it though. I think it was not very popular too, seeing that carrots are very commmon and cheap here. [In this picture: broad beans plant]




[20] If you don't like walking, the farm even prepared a passenger tractor to transfer you to parts of the farm. One of the tractor stop was right next to the cherry picking area. On the tractor, we met a group Malaysian families from Birmingham. [Picture: apple tree!]




[21] The farm also have its own maize maze, although it doesn't compare with the maize maze we played the day before, since it was a normal maze and it was free for te public too. the end point of the maze is where the British flag is. I admit that we were cheating though because was rather lazy to play properly :P Took what looked like illegal shortcuts taken by previous people.




[22] Rows and rows of strawberries to be picked. liked the idea that they are planted on the higher shelf. that way, you do not have to keep on bending and standing up to do the picking. I didn't do any strawberry picking today because have been doing that in the past week (at Snowshill) and the day before too (at Ansty PYO).




[23] The farm has a lively picnic area with its own playground. Our lunch that day was a simple chicken wrap, some leftover brownies that I baked for hubbykun's colleagues and the freshly picked cherries! yummy!! Btw, the playground area was separated from the picnic tables by tall hedge, so you need not worry of balls accidentally flying into your plates ;) actually, our earlier plan was to head to the sunflower field, but seeing that the sky was really cloudy and we do not have much time due to other plans for the night, we decided to continue picking MORE cherries! hahaha.




[24] The best cherries were the dark red ones. Very sweet and tasty. We first tried cherries when we were spending out honeymoon trip in Switzerland back in 2009, but they weren't as sweet as these. Even in supermarkets here, you can never find such sweet ones. I think if it is picked this late, then the fruits will probably be spoiled very fast, so that's why supermarkets usually sell the not so ripe ones. Hubbykun declared that cherries are officially his favourite fruit now (has been mine for much longer though ;) ).




[25] I'm not exactly sure what plant this is. So I did a bit of research earlier (courtesy to Google Image), and it looked very much like the asparagus plant. There were many more fruits and vege variety available for picking at Courts Farm should in case you wanted to try them out. To name a few I havent mentioned before: sweet corns, pears, plums, blueberries, onions, beetroot, rhubarb, pumpkins, etc. For a more complete list, do refer their official link here.




[26] finally, a video of the happy happy happy weekend! If you can't see the video, click right here.








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