F1 hybrid

My first grandson, Oscar, born at 1.07pm today, 6lbs 4oz.

A grand day out!

Never has man travelled 600 miles in one day and had so much fun before. I know I keep banging on about the NVS but if you're remotely interested in growing veg to show you have to join and throw yourself into their activities. And so it was that Saturday morning found me getting up at 4am and travelling up to the Pentland Science Park just outside Edinburgh to listen to Sherie Plumb give an excellent lecture on how she grows her spuds to almost undeatable standard.

The Scottish Branch of the NVS hold this annual seminar and what an event it is. I came away with a bag full of goodies that you won't be able to find at your garden centres and which I hope will help me in my quest to get a ticket at next year's National.

I made copious notes on Sherie's lecture and the best tips I shall be divulging during 2011. However, I shall be leaving others to try and topple Mrs. Plumb because the main purpose of my visit was to try and glean as much information as I could about growing peas to exhibition standard.

Whilst exhibiting at Westminster Charlie Maisey took me to one side and advised me to concentrate on 4 or 5 veg to try and grow to the highest standard possible. I don't necessarily agree with it as there are certain growers who can just about turn their hand to everything but I know what he means. Why try growing everything reasonably well when you grow a few things exceptionally well? With this in mind I've decided to try and grow peas with a view to getting a set of 12 on the bench at Llangollen in 2011 and will be devoting an obscene amount of effort to them next season.

And this is what I have to beat. Here is Ian Stocks winning set from Dundee this year. As you can see I don't have much to beat as the 4th one from the left is virtually yellow and the two on the far right aren't even peas!!!

I'm joking of course. Speaker Ian Simpson (National Champion twice) felt this set deserved to be considered for best in show but most judges do tend to go for the the big 'show stoppers' such as leeks, onions and parsnips when considering where to award the gong for best veg.

When I informed Dave Thornton today of my ambition to bench a set of peas at Llangollen he said "only poofs grow peas". Having met Mr Stocks at the weekend he is built like a brick shithouse so i'm immensely looking forward to seeing Dave's neck get stretched next August.

Peas are '20 pointers' along with long carrots, parsnips, leeks, onions, caulis and potatoes which reflects how difficult it is to grow them, especially as mildew is a real problem and makes it very difficult to grow them here in England beyond early August. But I have a few tricks up my sleeve thanks to the seminar and my new friends in the north!

Own seed

I've had another iffy year with long carrots and I was at a loss as to why this has been so. I've used the same mix for many years and if anything I've been more meticulous the last couple of seasons in making sure all my ingredients were properly mixed. The boreholes have all been the same size and good quality seed has been used. Whilst pulling carrots for Derby Show last month I even extracted this weird looking specimen which was huge at the top and had no less than 14 three foot long tap roots!!!
















Whilst lying in bed one morning last week something popped up! It suddenly struck me what the problem might be and it's the octopus above that gave me the answer. When I pulled it virtually the whole of the compost 'cone' in the borehole came up with it and it was absolutely dust dry despite all the rain we had recently had.

I'm now thinking the answer may be to water the mix slightly before filling the boreholes. I've always dribbled the mix into the bore holes dry and assumed that by watering the surface the whole bore hole mix would be wetted. If you've ever tried to water compost that has really dried out you will know how difficult it can be, and if you scratch down the top few centimetres you will very often see that it is still dry beneath. I think the compost in all my bore holes, for stumps and long carrots, were just too dry a few inches down despite my watering them during and after germination. I know a few growers will water their mix and add a dash of liquid nutrimate so I will do something like this next season....not too much that it is too wet as I want to be able to sprinkle it easily into the boreholes, but just enough that it won't dry out completely as it evidently did this season.

At Derby David Thornton's allotment buddy Charles Cooper actually beat him in the class for 3 long carrots (much to Dave's annoyance...it was very funny!) and Charles insisted I took his winning set of three and try to grow them on for my own seed. To do this you cut the top 4 inches or so off thus......












......and plant them in a large bucket of compost thus. With a little luck I shall be harvesting my own strain of champion seed next summer with a view to growing these on for show in Olympic year 2012. These are in my greenhouse and will be left to their own devices over winter.















This weekend I am really looking forward to driving up to Scotland for the annual seminar of the Scottish Branch of the National Vegetables Society where Sherie Plumb will be giving a talk on growing potatoes for show. Ian Simpson will be also lecturing on growing peas to show standard which is a good job as I have duly vowed that I will become National pea champion at Llangollen in 2011, thus ending a six thousand year reign by Scottish growers.

In the past I have always managed to grow excellent show standard peas.......in early July! Getting them to look good at the end of August in England is a whole different proposition so I need to learn quickly. God loves a trier!

Again, I would urge anyone remotely interested in growing for show to join the NVS as I will hopefully be getting furnished with a few seeds of championship winning strains of long beet and peas whilst I am at the seminar. I'm always gob-smacked at the generous nature of fellow growers who are often champions at National level and who fall over themselves to give you advice and goodies! Where else do you find that sort of thing in this day and age?

And today's speaker is.....

I've been asked if I'd be interested in giving a talk on growing tomatoes to a group of like minded extremists. It's something I've often thought about doing but at the moment I don't have the facilities or the time. But it's made me think about what I would say if I did have to stand up in front of a group of veg enthusiasts and talk about tommies.


With this in mind I've come up with the following bullet points.

• Varieties.....at the minute Cedrico is the one to beat. Gold Star has thin skins and tends to split easily. Sow indoors mid Feb for August shows and mid March for September shows and beyond. (Midlands UK timings)



• Grow in bottomless pots sunk into the greenhouse border soil. Fill the pots with good quality compost and plant strong, healthy plants, preferably with the first flower truss just visible. Push a strong cane into the pot, down into the border soil at the same time.




• Sink a lemonade bottle upside down into the border soil between each pot. The bottom of the bottle, in effect now the top is cut off creating a sort of funnel. At first watering is into the bottomless plant pot but as the roots get down into the soil water into the lemonade bottles which seeps into the soil going straight to the roots. Each plant will need a good couple of pints each day in mid-summer. The border soil surface needs to be dry towards harvest time. Tomatoes like a hot, dry atmosphere and keeping the soil surface dry helps. It also reduces the risk of moisture marking the skins or fungal infections attacking the plants.

• Two weeks before planting work a generous helping of blood, fish and bone and some seaweed meal into the border soil.



• Tie plants to the canes regularly and pinch out side shoots at 2-3". I also connect all the vertical canes to a horizontal cane about 3' up, which in turn is attached to the greenhouse framework. Too often in the past I've had plants fall over and canes break so now I don't allow this to happen.



• Start feeding when the first tomato on the bottom truss is the size of a pea. I use home made comfrey feed, homemade nettle feed and tomorite used in turn at EVERY watering. Little but often. From early August I now use soot water as a fourth feed. I'm now convinced this improves skin and calyx colour. You only need a dash of this jet black liquid in each can.

• Consider thinning out trusses to give fruits room to swell, by cutting out every other one when small. This will give you fewer, but rounder fruits and is an important consideration when being judged.

• You may also need to support the fruits as a heavily laden truss can rip itself from the main stem. I twine string around the truss and tie to the horizontal cane mentioned above. I find the upper trussses don't need supporting as not only are the fruits smaller there don't seem to be as many fruits on each truss.




• Examine your plants as often as you can to make sure they are looking healthy. Don't panic. You can often mistake the odd discolouration for something serious but I find the odd leaflet will go yellow at the tips. Look out for caterpillar droppings on the upper side of the leaflets. The culprit can often be found above the droppings but can be well hidden so don't give up til you find the f*cker. The south american tomato moth is the culprit and is moving across europe apparently. I found about four last season. The best deterrent is enviromesh over all openings, important if, like me, you like to leave the door open during mid summer at night for good ventilation during the hottest spells.




• If it's three weeks before your show and the fruits aren't ripening you can do a couple of things. First, cut back foliage to allow light in and also shock the plant into ripening some fruit. You can cut quite a lot of the bottom foliage back, say cutting the leaflets by a half to two thirds. Tired leaves are stripped right back to the main stem. By this time my plants have been trained from the top of the canes along strong strings up into the apex of the greenhouse so there is still plenty of foliage to keep the plants ticking along. This can make things quite dark so be removing some of the foliage all over the plant you are allowing light in. You can also hang ripe bananas amongst your plants. This is an old greengrocer trick and the ethylene gas produced by the ripe bananas wafts over the tomatoes and encourages ripening. The photo below shows my greenhouse before any thinning has taken place about mid-August this year. Not bad for an unheated 8'x6' aluminium greenhouse!

• The afternoon before the show you need to choose your fruits. Ideally they need to be about 60-65mm diameter so cut a couple of cardboard gauges to help you. I have one at 60mm and one at 65mm. As I pick the likely looking fruits I will check the diameter and put into a couple of sets, as very often I am looking for two sets, one for the main class and one for a collection such as Top Tray. They need to be as round as possible with fresh calyces, cut as far from the knuckle as you can. Any with skin blemishes are discarded. Ones with minor imperfections will be put to one side for consideration later if i'm struggling to make a set. I check the depth and shape from the side as well as from above as two fruits the same diameter can often be completely different shapes in side profile. You may want to take a few spares although I find this unnecessary with Cedrico as the skins stay hard for a long time. Gold Star was very prone to splitting between picking and staging.




• I pack each fruit carefully in tissue paper for transportation to the show. The most important thing I did this year was to make a compartmentalised wooden carrying box with a lid. I can now put other boxes on top of this without fear of the fruits coming to any harm.














• Before leaving for the show, 'stage' them in your kitchen for best effect and then place them back in the box in the order you will be staging them at the show. It also allows you to double check the condition of each fruit in good light. Do no polish or wash the skins if you can avoid it. Sometimes you may have a bit of dirt under the calyx so wet a cotton bud and use that to clean it you have to.

• At the show you can stage your fruits without stress knowing you have chosen the best possible selection.

• 

• After your plants are spent, remove them and burn. I very often have to extract a huge root system as the plants have gone way out into the border soil. Shake off as much of the soil as you can. The canes should be washed with weak Jeyes fluid solution and stored in a dry place for use next season. The greenhouse needs a good clean with Jeyes fluid or Armillatox and the border soil can also be drenched with the same solution. During the winter pour several buckets of rain water over your soil to stop a build up of salts. About every 4 or 5 years I would advise emptying out your border soil and replacing with fresh soil, say from your onion or leek beds.