Weeeee are the chaaaaampions...........

This was a good weekend. United won a trophy (albeit the minor Community Shield) against Chelsea 3-1 and yesterday I collected the 3 trophies I won at a show back in July. I had left them with the organisers as they keep them to get them engraved. This is always a nice touch I find and it is good to see your name on a piece of silverware. More shows should do this but I guess it can be an unnecessary expense. Still, it's a nice feeling to start cluttering up the trophy shelf again. Liverpool and Arsenal can only dream of that!



I spent most of today pottering and tweaking, or as my wife likes to call it....fannying about. At this time of the season there's not a lot more you can do but keep things ticking over as most of the hard work should have been done. On the NVS website some of the lads are posting photos from their shows so you can get an idea of what quality is going to be put on the benches in the next few weeks.

My Cedrico tomatoes are growing pretty well. Because I wanted to have plenty to choose from at Malvern at the end of September I sowed them later than usual, with the result that I have lots of green fruits and my first shows only 3 weeks away. With this in mind I placed 3 ripe bananas below 3 of the oldest plants in order for the ethylene gases to rise up and encourage the lower fruits to start ripening. This really does work.



The photo below shows how I water them. I water into the inverted plastic bottles that are buried well down between the pots so that the water gets straight to the roots. Feeding is done into the pots where the plants are growing, although I will feed into the pop bottles from now on to keep the soil surface as dry as possible. Tomatoes like it hot and dry and any moisture can cause mildew on the fruits so it's important to water carefully and not splash about.



I'm being told that Sweet Candle is growing amazingly well for just about everyone so the big shows should be quite a sight at the stump carrot section. The foliage on my plants is almost bursting out of the enviromesh, and the shoulders are absolutely huge. If they are the same size all the way down I can't wait to harvest them. I gave the foliage a quick spray with epsom salts which I'm told can enhance the colour of the root. This bed of 24 carrots was grown specifically with Malvern in mind and I am prepared to pull the whole lot to get a set of 3.



Mixed fortunes with my long carrots but this bed has improved dramatically in the last month or so. You never know.....I may yet have some quality specimens under here.

After harvesting my Winston spuds (pile of shite) I filled these pots with the old growing medium and a few added nutrients, and sowed a couple with radishes and 3 with turnips. The radishes will be ready in 4 weeks and will be used as gap fillers in my trugs. The turnips should be ready in 10 weeks or so and can be entered in 'any other veg' classes, useful in later shows. The rest of the pots are spare Kestrel potatoes that should give me some new spuds on Christmas Day.

My celery has had to fend for itself but is doing reasonably well. I intend to put a polythene cover round them soon as I shan't be showing these until October and the cold nights can soon make them look a bit limpid.

In the raised bed I grew my pickling shallots harvested in June, then some lettuce for the July show (I didn't win!) I am now growing these 'Prince' french beans. These should be cropping well in time for Sutton Bonington and may last until Malvern.