Gulp!

I've had an andvance copy of the schedule for the National Championships in Wales and it's bought home to me how much work I have to do between now and then. In previous years when the schedule has arrived (with the NVS Quarterly magazine) I've had a quick look and filed it away in the hope that one day I might compete. But now I'm booked in at the hotel there's no backing out although i'm not getting carried away. The National is placed down to 5th in each class and believe me if I get a single 5th placed ticket the trip will be deemed worthwhile......although of course I expect to win peas!

One of the classes I hope to enter at Llangollen is for 3 cucumbers. On a local level i'm very rarely beaten with cu's but at NVS level it's a whole different ball-game. I'm going to be growing them a different way this season, and it will involve constructing a pair of wooden 'A'-frames at the far end of the greenhouse with a plank across to be able to grow the plants in growbags on the plank. The plants' leading shoots will be trained along horizontal wires the length of the greenhouse so that the fruits hang down away from the coarse foliage and hopefully won't get marked. In the past I've grown them up canes for 4 or 5 feet before training them horizontally, but you very often get good cu's after 2 or 3 feet which come into contact with the tangle of foliage. I've had to protect them with sheets of polystyrene and even had to cut out valuable leaf material to stop the fruits getting scratched. By growing them on the plank so high up they will barely reach a couple of foot before they are being grown horizontally. This is the way Charles Maisey grows his cucumbers and he's been National Champion several times so if it's good enough for him I shall be giving it a try. I like this method because it means the border space the cucumbers would normally be taking up can now be used to grow something else so I'm thinking along the lines of french beans, lettuce and globe beet. It's a few years since I've grown anything in growbags so I'll need to be on top of the watering regime.

Thinking way, way ahead of myself I've also constructed a box should I be lucky enough to have a set of fruit good enough to exhibit. The dividers will be covered over with cloth and allow me to tranport them securely on long journeys with them rolling about. Cu's are more difficult to grow than people think, with the timing to get 3 identical fruit one of the main issues. I've known them gain an inch a day in length once they start to form. Allegedly, a top National grower set his alarm clock for 18 minutes past three in the morning as he estimated that would be when a fruit he needed for a set of three would have put on the extra 3mm he needed !