Children at a day nursery had a case of Hallowe’en horror when they went to harvest their pumpkins last week from a town allotment plot.

To their sadness, the pumpkins had been stolen and not for the first time as the same thing happened to them last year as well!However a local store has stepped in and saved the day for the youngsters and donated not two, but nine pumpkins to the nursery.Growing them from seed, the children had been watching their Hallowe’en treats getting bigger and bigger, visiting them twice a week to water them.They went to collect them the day before Hallowe’en in 2018 and found their pumpkins had been stolen, so this year, they went two weeks earlier, only to find they had been stolen again.Kane Gore, director of the Monmouth Day Nursery said they were growing the pumpkins on a plot owned by former committee member Roger Ward.“The children grow things from seeds in the cold frame at the nursery and then take them over to the allotment and plant them,” he told the Beacon.“We go over twice a week in the better weather to watch them grow, weed and water them and then harvest and use what we can in the children’s meals; they have had sweetcorn and salad and cooking apples in their crumbles.”“Last year when we went to collect them the day before Hallowe’en they had gone missing, that close to Hallowe’en I wasn’t surprised so this year we went two weeks prior thinking we were safe!“It’s not uncommon for things to go missing from the allotment, quite often we go down there to pick the strawberries and someone has already pinched the fruits,” he added.“The children would have got so much out of it harvesting the pumpkins, bringing them back and carving them, but it’s the way of the world unfortunately.“There were a lot of sad faces that day,” he added.However, help was at hand as partners of Waitrose got to hear of it and rallied around to save the day saying the store should do something.Rhiannon Moon, Community Champion for Waitrose sent a message to the day nursery in Howells Place that Waitrose was more than happy to help out and invited the children over and let them pick out nine pumpkins and gave them sets of carving tools.Vanessa Redmond, pictured with the children said the partners thought it was an awful thing to happen and they had to do something to help outKane added that they will use the pumpkins for a variety of things, “some we will carve, others will be used in drawing and painting and we let the children explore the pumpkins; there are a lot of activities we will get out of this”.