Hallowe'en Heidi

You couldn't pay me to go to America. I hate their TV shows. Their reliance on therapy makes me piss my pants. But I absolutely love the American import that is Hallowe'en. The kids round here love it also and it was for this reason that I was to be found this afternoon carving my beloved 262lb Heidi into the shape of a hideous fiend. My thanks to Dan for the inspiration!

She was a bugger to start with but eventually things started to take shape.

All beautiful women have their ugly side.

Heidi feels peckish. The pumpkin she is eating must be 25lbs.

One final photo with my love interest of the summer!

My youngest daughter Rebecca and her alien friends seemed impressed!!!

Everlasting spuds

I've been experimenting with my spuds to see if I can save them from show to show. It's accepted that you can show things like onions and shallots in many shows, from August through to November and generally they tend to look better as they ripen. Marrows and pumpkins usually last several shows although you would have to take care transporting them. I have shown carrots on two different weekends but you do lose some colour and condition by the 2nd weekend.

I've always felt that spuds can only be shown once but got talking to a guy at Sturton who maintains he uses the same spuds throughout the growing season, by wrapping them individually in dry kitchen towelling after each show and storing them in a fridge. In fact, he pointed to a set at Sturton that had been out of the ground since early August and had been to several shows including Harrogate. By that time (3rd October) it was looking a bit rough at its base but it did manage a 2nd place (behind my fresher looking set). The potato in the photo was one of my winning set of white spuds from Sturton, the variety Winston, that I wrapped up and stored in the fridge. It's now 3 weeks since that show and I think it's looking pretty good and could certainly compete at local village level. I think if it's a single day show you could get away with it, but if the show is any longer than that then the spuds will start to go green quite quickly.

I shall certainly be trying this more and more next season. It will mean I can keep my better spuds for the more important shows and then show these same ones a week or more later at other shows, and also save me time as I won't have to scrub as many.

My best ever crop

T'is my eldest daughter Heather's 21st birthday today and we had 'a bit of a do' last night. She's the one in the middle, with her sisters Jennifer 19(right) and Rebecca 14 (left). I feel old.

Purple Puff

I was really taken when I saw this dahlia at Malvern.....until I saw the name. Being totally and utterly anti-all things remotely Quentin Crisp I can never ever grow this plant. What was the raiser thinking?

Celery rust

T'is a good job I'm not proud and only show my good stuff on this blog. I have many, many failures each season and by far the most pathetic of all my veg this season has been my celery. I only grow 5 plants in order to get a set of 2 for Sturton and did manage to get a 2nd (out of 2....the pair on the right!), but the quality was hopeless. Celery is a bog plant in the wild so it can take as much water as you can throw at it, and needs to be grown in good quality moisture retentive soil with added manure.

All was reasonably well until late August when once again they succumbed to celery rust disease. Within weeks the foliage was devastated and I had to take off the worst affected leaflets to make them reasonably ok to consider showing them. Asking around on the NVS forum I'm told Dithane 945 will combat this but you need to spray BEFORE you have the problem. Of course if the foliage suffers then the size suffers as a result so I didn't have very large specimens either. I've grown Red Star for the past 5 years (it's a Man Utd thing!) but I think I'll have a change next season and try Morning Star which seems to be the favoured variety on the NVS benches.

You didn't.....did you?

Did you really think I wasn't going to comment on Liverpool's calamity keeper being beaten by a deflected shot off a beachball last Saturday? He actually went to save the beachball! Hilarious! Man Utd are playing like idiots and yet we're still top of the league. Even more hilarious!


But none of this is quite as hilarious as our postal workers trying to convince us that carrying around a duffel bag with a few hundred letters and having to lift up a really heavy metal flap every 30 yards means they deserve more money, when our brave boys are fighting Osama Bin Bastard's murdering rag heads in Afghanistan and when the rest of us are doing more for less just to try and keep our jobs you moaning, lazy f*ckwits! I'd love to know the percentage of postal workers who have scouse tendencies.

Langdale layabout

Just got back from a long weekend in the Lakes with friends. Ticked off another 4 'Wainwrights'......Pike O'Blisco (that's me on the summit looking out over the Langdale valley), Crinkle Crags and Bow Fell on an awesome day of clear sunny weather on Saturday and then Dow Crag (I think!) on a shitty, misty, drizzly Sunday.

Now it's time to get down to the important business of getting next year's seed order sorted.

Beat by better beet

I usually pick up a few wins in the beetroot class but have only managed a couple of 2nds and a 3rd this season. Admittedly I didn't give them as much care and attention as I usually do, not thinning them out after germination, but I am usually able to clean up a reasonably matched set by scouring the corkiness from the shoulders. However, this year it wasn't to be and the quality of the round beet at Malvern made me realise I must up my game. The fact that the winning beet at Malvern were so obviously illegally oiled with something is neither here nor there! That's one for the conscience of the exhibitor!

Next season I plan to have ready some raised wooden beds made from 12" planks filled with good quality compost. This should allow me to tend to them better and be more easily able to draw compost over the shoulders to help prevent corky skin. I shall probably grow a whole raised bed like this purely with Malvern in mind. Most of the top growers grow Pablo these days instead of Red Ace. I tried Pablo a couple of seasons back and didn't get on with it. I may have to have another shot at it.

Storing 8oz onions

Whilst I've nailed the size and shape of my 8oz onions by measuring them regularly and pulling as soon as they get up to size, I suffered with some strange markings this season. They are a mixture of little black speckles and what look like tide marks and I think it's down to storing them in my garage. I'm sure the change in temperature between night and day causes condensation which affects the skin condition. I think I need to guarantee a more constant temperature to ensure more even ripening. At this point my wife no longer needs to read any further.

Next year I'm storing them in our bedroom!!!

Better quality shallots

Earlier this year I managed to get 12 of National Champion Dave Thornton's shallots (He fought like a bugger but I managed to get them off him eventually).

I grew them on this season alongside my own retained stock and the difference between them was quite striking. Whilst my own 'seed' actually grew bigger the shape was all over the place, so I have now totally discarded these to the kitchen pot.

I now have about 30 bulbs from the Thornton strain for replanting next season. The best of these have bought me 5 wins in the shallot classes this season (including this one at Sturton last weekend), which is amazing considering that prior to that I'd only ever won a total of 9 shows with shallots in 13 previous years. I didn't get them to grow huge, but they were classically 'flask' shaped with nice flat bottoms. Next season I will give them a more favourable planting position alongside one of my raised onions beds in the hope of getting bigger specimens.

The year of the fly!

There is a school of thought that says carrot fly can only fly about 18" off the ground. People who reckon that are about as deranged as Rafa Beneathus when he says Liverscum are going to win the Premiership (sorry Mark the Ciderman!).

I've always had the odd mark but this year has been my worst ever. As you can probably see from my Sturton set above I had it quite badly, which obviously prevents me from showing at the highest level, which is annoying as otherwise I had some fair sized and decent shaped carrots this season. Part of my problem was that I didn't scatter some of my highly toxic (and probably banned!) insecticide around the crowns during the weeks when I was bravely fighting death due to swine flu!

But really I need to be making sure the fly have no way of getting to them by erecting some form of physical barrier and to this end I have bought some enviromesh to cover my long carrots/stump carrots and parsnips. I shall spend the Winter months wisely by mackling together some form of wooden cover to go around my drums and beds to which I will staple the mesh. Hopefully, I won't then have to rely on my insecticides so much. Organic shock horror! I must be going soft!

In the meantime I have given the sand a bloody good drenching with some cheap bleach in order to kill off any eggs. Phew.....he's back!

Now all I have to do is to get my seed and I've been promised some top notch stuff from an unbeatable Scottish grower who shall of course be nameless, but whose wife is absolutely hopeless at growing spuds!

You've got to be shitting me?!?

Not veg related but this is starting to annoy me. One of the photography classes at Sturton was entitled 'Green Interest'. Of course there is a wide subject matter for such a title, and both myself and Leesa entered with brilliant photos, especially mine which was truly great. Anyway, the winner was this doctored piece of 'Okay yah' claptrap, a black and white photo which had a tiny piece of it digitally altered to green. Oh for f*ck's sake! The same thing happened last year. Am I mistaken in thinking that you click a button on your camera, you have the resulting shot developed (or downloaded these days!) and voila....THAT is a tossing photograph. To me a photograph is the same as what you shot. Did this person say to his daughter '"right darling, can you just turn black and white for a minute but you can leave your toy green". Photographists are such a bunch of pretentious knob jockeys.

Free seeds anyone?

I split open my best shaped Blyton Belle marrow today. It formed part of my equal fourth placed set at the Midland NVS Championships at Malvern (if the prize cards went down to 5th as they do in the National I have no doubt they would have come equal sixth!!!). Anyway, I have now extracted all the seeds and have a load to give away. If anyone would like half a dozen drop me a line and I'll post them to you. I already have one or two that I have promised some seeds to.

The marrow on the right is Blyton Motley. I'm not too sure about this one as it's a little too similar to Belle, although at Sturton Les Stothard reckoned I should persevere with it.

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Sturton 2009

Well thank goodness for my spuds! I lost the cup for most points in veg for the first time in 8 years to Bill Croft who I noticed was amongst the cards at Harrogate. I'm not surprised as he put some very good stuff in at Sturton. However, thanks to my cacti, dahlias and a bonus 2nd place in the photograph section I did win the cup for most points in the whole show for the 6th time.

As far as my veg was concerned I ran up 4 wins out of the 6 spud classes (round/kidney/coloured kidney and 3 sets of 3) and was 2nd in the other two (white kidney and size&quality).

I was also chuffed to stage this set of Sir Alf Ramsey dahlias, which didn't win but got a 'highly commended'. They just needed to open out a bit more. I've never grown this variety before but was given a tuber by Kev Broxholme (aka git) and managed to have 4 blooms ready on the day, the 4th one going into my 2nd place winning entry in the one flower/1 veg class. I shall certainly be growing this one again as the blooms are absolutely show-stoppingly huge, as you can see when you compare it to my head which is very big in order to house my incredibly large brain.

And so that's it for another season. I could do one or two late shows but I've had enough for now. The garden is a mess and I want to get back on top of things and get a head start for next season. I've already started sieving my compost for the spuds next season......I'm using the same compost as I didn't get any blight this season, but this time I'm making sure I sieve out all the lumps in order to get more refined spuds hopefully.

I plan to pick and choose what classes I enter next season and not try and enter lots of classes in every show, with a view to putting my best stuff in at Malvern in my quest to win a red card at the highest level. I think I can do it. All in all I had a good season but getting swine flu at a critical time meant the garden ran away from me a bit. Not being able to get decent leek and onion plants in the Spring meant I was a little bit half-hearted with everything else, especially as the recession forced me to be involved in some very upsetting redundancies in February and March. My heart just wasn't in it like it usually is. But seeing my stuff against the very best at Malvern showed me I don't have an awful lot of improvement to make to be able to compete. I could really do with winning the lottery or, better still, if there is an anonymous millionaire follower of this blog who would like to cover my salary then please don't hesitate to contact me!

Scum

No excuses. No human rights wankers saying it's barbaric and has no place in our society. No Lord f*cking Longfords saying they can be reformed and we need to understand what made them do it. These disgusting, vile pigs need executing .....now! As long and painfully as possible!

Spud spouse swap shock!

Whilst I may have the odd debauched, pervy thought about Heidi (Sugababes), Marg Helgenberger, Jane Seymour, Margaret Thatcher (whaaaat?!?), Christine Bleakley et al, there really is only one woman in the world I would consider swapping my wife for……Sherie Plumb….and then only for a single growing season! Hopefully that way I’d be as good as her at growing spuds by the end of the season. The NVS has produced a DVD showing her 2007 growing season and it is quite an eye opener to see her dedication and the lengths she goes to in order to present the perfect platter of spuds.

For instance, she washes all her seed spuds and discards all those that have blemishes so as not to risk introducing any disease onto her plot. The feed she puts in seems an awful lot but then again she is the queen of spuds. 4 buckets of sieved peat with 16oz each of calcified seaweed and Vitax Q4, all well mixed. And that lot only does about 3 polybags!!! Winston only gets 12oz of each as these tend to get too big otherwise.

It was quite interesting also to see how quickly she cleans her spuds for the bench. They seem to take no more than 30-45 seconds or so. I've just done my first set of 5 Winston for Sturton at the weekend and it's taken me a good half hour and I'm still not happy with them. At this time of the season they seem to have a dirty sheen to them which takes some getting off. I need guidance. Waddya say Sherie? I'm not a bad bloke really!

Last knockings

It’s my final show of the year this Saturday in the village of Sturton in Lincolnshire. I’ve said before that it’s a small village with a big show and I think this is the 122nd annual show which is incredible when you think about it. My thoughts are with the show secretary Rebecca who lost her husband suddenly at the age of 52 in August.

I’ve entered 53 classes, not just in veg but also in dahlias, cacti and some photos! I think the pick of my veg will be my spuds. I emptied all my entries out of the compost they’re being stored in a week or so ago to have a look at them and was very pleased with the condition of them. Hopefully they’ll scrub up well and land me some wins in the 6 classes they have for spuds. I shall prepare half of them tonight as I think I shall need about 40 in all, which is too many to leave until tomorrow night.

After Saturday teatime it’ll be time to start ordering those seeds and thinking about next season. How the sands of time are swiftly falling through that hole!