Bring on 2010

And so the time has come to assess and evaluate the season's successes and failures in order to plan for next year. One thing Mark Robert's talk reasserted and which I cannot stress enough is the need to plan your season well in advance and do as much preparation as you possibly can. Attention to detail is king where show veg are concerned and the very top growers go to extraordinary lengths during the season to make sure their veg is in tip-top condition. It also makes them very weird in many cases and not the sort of chap you'd want to get stuck in a lift with if you didn't share their hobby. I'm told the divorce rate among growers is quite high!

It's been a strange old year for me. During the course of it I've had the pleasure of meeting several followers of this blog and it's shown me that you are all a varied assortment of ball-scratching remedials and window lickers, but hey, I love you all.

My season got off to a bad start as I couldn't source any decent onion plants and I couldn't get any leek plants at all. Due to the state of the economy work got off to a disastrous start to the year meaning I was heavily involved in making upsetting redundancies. If I'm honest my heart wasn't into growing for the first few months of the year. Happily, we can now look forward to work in the New Year so I have renewed vigour and interest.

My main focus in 2010 will be trying to win a card in one of the main classes at the NVS Midlands Championships in September. I had a go of course in 2009 in a very low-key way and got a 2nd prize ticket in the novice class. I have a few ideas which classes I want to go for and will be revealing these in the New Year. One thing is for sure.....I shall be timing sowings so that I grow several beds of veg purely for this show. I'm thinking globe beetroot, stump carrots, french beans and tomatoes.

I shall have to improve on long carrots, stump carrots and parsnips and I plan to build enviromesh frames around all my drums and beds to keep off carrot fly, canker, willow aphid, pox and knob-rot.....all of which I seemed to be afflicted with this season. The sand in the drums will need a damned good sterilising first. Main successes in 2009 for me were marrows, shallots and potatoes. Looking back at some show photos I found this one of Sherie Plumbs winning dish of Kestrel at the 2007 National held at Malvern.

Compare this dish to my winning set of 5 at Sturton and I reckon I'm not a million miles away. You can bet that Sherie's dish would have been absolutely spotless however, so I need to work hard on that, but you do see plates of spuds at the top shows that show the odd blemish and they win cards so I reckon with hard work and attention to detail I have a chance of getting in the 'tickets'.