'Beeting' death once more

Regular readers of my humble blog will recall how I bravely hauled myself from the precipice of certain death in 2009 when I contracted swine flu. Well, i'm fairly sure i've got it again and have spent the last 3 days in bed with nigh-on identical symptons. I didn't think you could get it more than once but i'm told you can but my body will have built up antibodies from the first attack. Doesn't bloody feel like it!!! Good job my body is made from girders!

However, I'm feeling a little better now on what is an important day psychologically. From now the days are getting longer and growers are itching to get things going. However, a look out of the window from my sick bed tells me to forget all about any ideas for planting and sowing. Whilst the country is blanketed in thick snow and places like Heathrow are at a standstill here in Leicestershire we've escaped the recent flurries but the landscape has been bleached white by deep frosts.

At the start of the month I drove up to Nelson in Lancashire to collect 24 'Pendle Improved' blanch leek plants from Dave Metcalfe. These have been put into a hastily erected growing chamber under a grolamp in my garage but because I have been unable to get down to the garage for several days these have dried out and suffered a check. Ho-hum. 30 quid down the drain it would appear.

I am in no rush to get my onions sown in this weather but I shall try and get a sowing done towards the end of the month. I grew some seed supplied by Scottish grower Ian Stocks last year and whilst it was a late February sowing and they therefore didn't attain great size I was please with their shape and shall be having a better 'go' with them this year. I'm never after huge....just a couple of pounds or more with good shape and uniformity.

My shallots will go into 3" pots in early January. Last year I never saw any shoots until mid-February because of freezing weather early in the year so I see no reason sowing on the shortest day as used to be advocated. I had my best ever year for shallots and will be hoping to stage a set at next year's National.

Leaving all this aside, I think i'm better off concentrating on summer crops if i'm to have any chance of getting a ticket at Llangollen. Tomatoes will be a must but I'm always struggling to get enough fruits ripe by early August. It isn't quite as simply as merely sowing early. However, I know if I can get my timings right I'll have a real chance.

I shall also be giving cucumbers a real go with a few changes to my greenhouse set-up in mind after listening to Charlie Maisey a few weeks ago. French beans are another crop I'm sure I could grow to a high standard and despite general disdain from my NVS pals north of the border peas as well. I've often grown good peas in the past but it's rare that you will see them exhibited around my neck of the woods past the middle of August due to mildew attack. Because of the effort involved in growing potatoes to show standard I will probably grow less spuds and give the land over to growing quality peas up 8' canes instead. At this point in time my aim is merely to stage a set that doesn't look out of place in such exalted company. If I didn't genuinely think I could do it I wouldn't bother but thanks to tips picked up at the Scottish Branch seminar lecture by former National Champion Ian Simpson and the not insignificant ridicule coming my way from the scottish tribe that has stirred my determination then who knows? Anything in life is possible. I mean, who'd have thought someone who can't sing would have won X-Factor? Again! (Please tell me Matt Cardle had barbed wire round his bollocks! It's the only thing that can explain how someone can sing that badly....although not why so many of the Nation voted for him!).

Although there isn't a class for globe beetroot at the National I will be looking for a set of 4 for a class known as the Millennium Class. This is a real forward thinking class introduced by the NVS a few years ago (errrr 2000-ish i'm guessing?) requiring 5 plates of veg, namely 4 tomatoes, 4 potatoes, 4 stump carrots, 4 250g onions and 4 globe beet. I'd always had a good record with globe beet locally but when you visit an NVS show you soon see that you're not even in the same ball park. There you will invariably find blemish free roots, with little corkiness around the shoulder and long thin tap roots sometimes 8-12" in length.

I'd heard that several growers will grow globe beet in bore holes much as you would you long carrots and parsnips but to me that seemed a lot of hard work for a 15 pointer 'minor' veg. I needed an easier method to suit my means so last year I experimented with several half barrels and an old galvanised water tank that I filled with sieved compost from my compost heap. To prevent weed seeds coming up from the homemade stuff I put a few inches of bagged compost on top of this. This was only mildly successful as I still got quite a few weeds coming up. A top dressing of high nitrogen fertiliser was applied a week or two before sowing as beet need quite a lot of nitrogen surprisingly.

As you can see the raised growing area makes it easier to tend the plants and to draw compost around the shoulders which helps prevent corkiness. A scattering of slug pellets is a must as I find slugs tend to take a bite out of many roots grown in the ground.

The result for me was my best ever shaped roots and that nice thin tap root the judges seem to go for. If you compare my second prize winning set from Derby below, which were grown in this way....

......to a set grown in the ground (below) it isn't hard to see the difference in quality. Those roots grown in the ground tend to have a little swelling at the top of the tap root and of course it's a lot harder to get a long tap root out of the ground which is invariably baked hard by the end of the summer.

For NVS shows I shall make sure I take more care extracting the beet from the compost to get as long a tap root up as possible by reaching down into the growing media as far as I can and snapping the root off at the very bottom if possible.

Globe beet should reach optimum tennis ball size 15 weeks from sowing by due to the vagaries of the British summer this varied from 7 to 20 weeks for me last season! I had some the size of grapefruits and others like radishes all from the same sowings!!! Therefore it's best to have as many drums and raised beds as you can possibly get your hands on to give you as much choice come show day.