Schools of (non) thought

For the past 3 years I've been working for 20% less wages than I was, with no pay rise in that time and for longer hours. Such is life in this fecked up financial world we live in, but you just have to get on with it. It means I cannot justify spending huge amounts on the garden so I have to mackle and make do. No doubt if I was a bleating twat, surviving on only on 13 weeks paid holiday a year, working in warm classrooms, starting at the ungodly hour of 9am and finishing at the ridiculous time of 3.30pm with only an hour and a half for lunch I would rise up and take the government to task for daring to ask me to contribute to the mess like every fucker else in the private sector is doing.




So, with less money to spend on expensive composts and Link-a-bord raised beds I've had to use a little ingenuity about the plot. I have two large compost bins made from old pallets and they really have been doing me proud the last couple of years with the amount of good quality homemade compost they've been churning out. I've managed to fill several old salvaged drums with this finely sieved homemade stuff for growing cylindrical beet in as there is a specific class for this in a couple of shows I hope to be entering this season including Westminster. I'm growing a variety called Forono for this, and the deep, friable compost in the drums means I should get some nice, straight, uniform roots with a long central tap root. This was the cylindrical beet class at Westminster last season. As you can see matching up is certainly harder than with globe beet so I'm growing a lot more this season as my entry was unplaced (middle right)!

I also managed to purloin this old recycling dustbin from the side of our house as it was never getting used for the job it was intended i.e. being filled with recycled rubbish. Purple bin bags were merely thrown in its general direction. Now the bin is full of more homemade compost and is being used to grow some 'Purple Haze' carrots which I believe are the sweetest tasting carrot. I also grow it as a colourful addition for trug displays.

Right, that's it for now, if you'll excuse me i've got to go and see if I can't eat into my holiday entitlement in order to look after my daughter whilst her teachers are standing up for their statutory perks.

Preparing for a Royal visit

My Kelsae onions are starting to bulb up nicely although I only have three that look as if they might make a decent size. The biggest is about 7" around and about 10" to the growing point. Hopefully they will complete their growth before the cucumbers growing over them shade them out too much and I can get a set of three which covers most of my local shows.



My long beet have really put on a growth spurt in the last couple of weeks. The foliage shows no sign of the leaf miner damage that I suffered from last season but on one of the larger plants some of the leaves were stuck together as if they'd been glued. It was quite weird and they took some prising apart, and a strip of one leaf remained 'welded' to the other. I expected to find some caterpillar that had cocooned itself in there but there seemed to be absolutely nothing. Strange.



The same story of clean foliage applies to my globe beet which is without doubt the cleanest i've ever seen thanks to regular applications with Decis. This bed is for a show in less than two weeks and some of them are already grapefruit size but there are several that give me confidence of getting a good set of three.

My first sowing of Stenner runner beans are really motoring up the metal rods and I have another batch of plants to go in the next week or so.

And my first batch of peas for the National look as if they're ready for planting but reading my notes from the Ian Simpson talk last year he plants his after 27 days! As I don't have my own experiences to call on yet I shall follow this information to the letter which means they are going in this Friday! Another batch will go in a week later and hopefully from 22 plants I can muster up the 12 pods required for an entry at Llangollen.....there's a lot of pest and fungus fighting between now and then though!

Last night I uprooted all my pathetic Cedrico (bar one plant that had turned green again!) and went to get some rooted cuttings from my very old pal Ian Taylor in Nuneaton. Whilst there I had a goosey gander at his allotment where he had some quite impressive onions and celery. It will be nice to have some competition at the local shows. He won't beat me though.

Anyway, this morning at 5.30am I was to be found replanting these new Cedrico. Examination of the outgoing plants showed me that the roots had barely got through the compost in the bottomless pots so my theory of them getting their roots into dry manure flies out of the window. When I cut the stems they were fresh green so that means it wasn't verticillium wilt. On reflection and having spoken to John Trim I now think my plants got a chill just after planting out which has thrown them out of kilter.I tried to plant early in order to make sure I had plenty to choose from at Llangollen where I felt I had a genuine chance of getting in the tickets. Not any more but at least I should now be back in business for Malvern and Westminster.

So all in all things are looking pretty good although I now have to pass inspection from Dave Thornton who has never visited my garden before but who is due in the next week or two. I think there are a few things that will impress him although he'll never admit it.

Phew

I emptied out the 4 pots of Casablanca on Friday evening having given them a week for the skins to harden. It was a good crop of small new potatoes but I did manage to secure 3 tubers about 5oz each for the local show in a couple of weeks time. I'm hoping the Casablanca growing in bags will be bigger come August but I was glad to find not a hint of scab on any of the tubers.

Casablanca is said to be a superior taste to other white varieties so tonight we had some of them boiled with a bit of barbequed lamb. My verdict? I still prefer Winston! However, with some courgettes this is my first real harvest of the season.

It was too hot this weekend to do anything too strenuous but I did manage to get my blanch leeks onto the next size collar, 13". With 2" of the leek below ground it gives me 15" and I may be able to get a total of 18" by the end of the season by unrolling the collar and turning it round the other way.

This was also the last opportunity to straighten any bent barrels before they get too thick to do anything with. By holding the barrel firmly and putting firm pressure against the bend you can straighten it before recollaring.

I don't know whether anyone else suffers the phenomenon of the leeks 'turning' after planting? I go to great lengths to make sure the leeks are planted 'square on' to the horizontal canes running alongside them in order to drape the flags over them neatly. But I always seemto get a few that turn meaning the flags are draped over the plants next to them and it makes it all a bit awkward, as well as ruining the effect of a neat row. Oh well. These are still the cleanest looking leeks I have ever had at this stage of the season. Thanks to regular blasts of Dynamec into the growing points I'm thrip damage free. If I had a polytunnel I guess I could throw a shit load of cash at buying some of those thrip predators that the organic Flowerdew mob go on about. The same ones that presumably fly out of the door along with your money?

And I also got the first three Carmen cucumbers planted up on the raised platform.I aim to run these along wires at eye level so that the cucs hang down away from the foliage to stop the skins getting marked.

Gotcha!

Aaaaaaargh!

The older one's among thee will remember the TV programme 'Noel's House Party' when Noel Edmunds would trick a well-known celebrity with some bizarre scheme to emerge with a 'Gotcha Oscar' at the end of it. Some of them appeared so far-fetched as you sat with the insider knowledge in your living room you wondered how any of them ever fell for some of the stunts.
 
Well I cannot believe I've fallen for this one today. In fact I'm devastated. I emailed Dave Thornton from work with a photo of the yellow tipping on some of my Kestrel leaves. His reply was quite alarming. "Your Kestrel will be dead within 2 weeks. Wet crack".
 
In a panic I quickly googled 'wet crack' to find out if there was anything that could be done to avert disaster. The list of websites that came up was like a who's who of the most debauched porn imaginable....and I imagine an awful lot of it! It will certainly take some explaining to the geeks in our IT Dept but to be fair they didn't believe me before when I insisted I'd merely mistyped the name of an old college friend I was trying to get back in touch with, Alan Entry.

Beet box

I think I may well have to take up stamp collecting instead of showing veg. There seems to be some sort of Bermuda Triangle around my tomato greenhouse as some aubergines have now decided to throw down their leaves in disgust.

Just outside the greenhouse this pepper plant also threw down its leaves overnight. Plants in pots next to it growing in exactly the same compost are doing fine.

And several of my Kestrel potatoes in bags are showing this weird yellow tipping on some of the leaves, although the rest of the foliage seems to be very glossy and healthy. Oh what a multitude of stress!

Dave Thornton reckons I should stick to growing radishes (at which I excel I might add), so with this in mind I have this fine row of 'Jolly' alongside my leeks just through in time hopefully for the 'any other veg' class at a show on 9th July. Sadly, there is no class for radish at the National but if there was I'd be a contender, no doubt about it.

This weekend I will sow one last row of Pablo beetroot with Westminster Show in mind, although in reality I've found that a set of three can come from rows sowed several weeks apart. Pablo does seem to be an easier beet to match up than Red Ace but it can produce all manner of sizes from marble to mangold all in one row. Having sown a row every weekend from mid-May I should now be well covered for all my shows but last season my best looking roots came from this old water tank filled with sieved compost from my own compost heap. I find you can grow them about 4" apart quite happily although leaf miners can decimate a bed if you're not vigilant. I've been spraying with Decis this season and haven't noticed any damage so far. I was hoping to time these for Llangollen for the Millenium class but as I won't have any tomatoes to go with them it looks like my local show the weekend after will benefit.

Beetroot needs a lot of nitrogen at first and once established I will also water in nitrate of soda and a dash of salt which is supposed to improve the colour. Growing in this tank with fine compost also means I can force my hand down the side of the root at harvest time and get as much of the tap root up as possible. Three globe beet just under tennis ball size, with long thin tap roots 8" long are what you are hoping for. And an appeal to some of those cheating bastards who coat their beet with some substance that means they still look wet after 2 days.....don't! Certainly at Malvern the schedule says something along the lines that any foreign substances will result in disqualification and hopefully other shows will follow suit, and not before time!

Fruit street hack

I spent a hugely enjoyable day walking around some fields near Kings Lynn today. I was asked to represent the National Vegetable Society at Thompson and Morgan's fruit press day held at R W Walpole's extensive fruit farm. David Allison the editor of the NVS quarterly magazine 'Simply Veg' was unable to attend so he asked me if I could step in.

What I know about fruit you can write on the back of a postcard so it was a bit weird to be amongst some of the foremost horticultural journalists in the country. But it was well worthwhile as I came home with a large doggybag full of fruit bushes and strawberry plants all ready for planting. I have to write a short piece on my visit for the NVS magazine so don't blink or you might well miss that one!

During a very pleasant lunch the person who plonked himself next to me was none other than ex-Gardener's World contributor Bob Flowerdew. It was with some trepidation as I think I've referred to him before on here as that 'organic ponytailed plonker', so I was preparing myself for a bit of a debate and maybe even a brawl. Luckily he doesn't subscribe to smithyveg.com so an incident was averted, but to be fair he was actually quite good fun.

Getting back to the plot tonight I think my tomatoes are virtually at death's door. The other night I thought I might have sussed out what I had done wrong. When I put manure in a trench below where the plants would grow it suddenly occurred to me that I had not watered it all prior to backfilling with the border soil. Consequently I thought perhaps my plants had thus got their roots into manure that was virtually dry and the problem was one of poor conductivity and the plants had become stressed. Therefore I whacked gallons of water into the bottomless pots to try and rectify my schoolboy error. After a couple of days of what I thought was improvement I now have to accept this hasn't worked and the plants will need to come up. I have several cuttings off Dave Thornton in a jar on a windowsill which I will pot up as soon as they have sent out roots. Oh how he loved giving me those. I'll never live it down.

Having said all this, several of you have mailed me saying you appear to be having very similar problems with your Cedrico, growing them in all manner of ways so there doesn't appear to be a common fault that I can put my finger on. Someone said it might be bad seed but I don't think that is the case as I planted out the strongest, healthiest plants I've ever had. Magnesium deficiency was another idea mooted but the leaf colour is nothing like that. I've had it in the past and a spray with epsom salts soon returns the colour to the plants.

It is annoying as I really did think tomatoes presented me with my best chance of getting into the tickets at the National. What's more they are always one of my banker veg for Top Tray collections.

Never mind....my parsnips 'Polar' are suddenly starting to grow well and are probably looking better than they have for a couple of years. I noticed some aphid activity yesterday so be on the lookout and spray as soon as you see them. I gave them a blast of garlic spray which is also a plant invigorator. I may yet be tempted to stage a set of 5 at Llangollen just for the hell of it.

And I put 12" cardboard collars onto my celery plants too. Whilst these are the healthiest, cleanest plants I've ever grown thanks to regular spayings of Decis and garlic spray they are quite small at the base and will need to bulk out a lot. The bottomless pots are really helping to keep the soil moist as the water is concentrated straight at the roots.

And i've been reasonably happy with my first ever attempt at growing 250g onions 'Vento' to maturity in the greenhouse in 7" pots. It ties up a lot of greenhouse space but means I should get a better skin finish and as I used sterilised bagged soil in the mix I won't get the white rot problems that I get in my veg plot soil. Canes and clips keep the foliage upright (I can assure you it's only the camera angle that makes them look as it they're leaning) and the protection of the greenhouse means they don't get buffeted by wind. As soon as these reach 83mm diameter I will get them up. After ripening I know they will be just under 250g in weight at that measurement.

Malvern crown in the balance

I've not posted photos of my tomatoes on here for some time, the reason being that i'm ashamed of them. Something has gone drastically wrong with them in the last month. They have gone from strong plants at planting out to insipid, yellowing, spindly things that look close to Death's door! I've tried spraying with epsom salts and top dressing with ammonium sulphate in case it was a magnesium or nitrogen deficiency but the plants have got worse. I've even cut off whole trusses of tomatoes as I tried to get the plant to re-balance themselves.

If I didn't know better I'd have said they'd been sprayed with weedkiller but the aubergines growing in front of them are fine. A few years ago there was a serious scare in some parts of the country with contaminated manure as cows ate grass that had been treated with a herbicide that didn't break down in the cows stomachs. As I spread new manure in a trench below my tomatoes I wondered whether it might be this but that is doubtful as the muck came from a local horse stable and as far as I know the lady owner doesn't spread any herbicide on her field. And besides, my celery is planted into the same stuff and that looks fine, as do the aubergines in front of the tomatoes. All-in-all it's a real mystery and comes just as I thought growing tomatoes was a piece of piss. My chances of defending my Malvern crown appear to have gone. Or have they?

World famous John Trim contacted me via the excellent NVS forum suggested it might be some form of hormonal imbalance, and an old trick from his days as Head Gardener in a large country estate was to crush a 75mg aspirin tablet in a pint of water and give each plant half a pint of the solution. I should see an improvement in a week....if it's going to work! I must admit i'm a little dubious and to be quite honest if it works i'll stage my own gonads on a plate at Malvern too! So I've had to swallow my pride and beg some sideshoots off Dave T this weekend which I will get rooted and plant up as soon as I can. They should get me fruits in time for Harrogate and Malvern if i'm lucky, but I shall limit them to 5 trusses instead of training up into the eaves.


Elsewwhere my long carrots go from strength to strength. I had a sneaky peak at national chumpion Dave T's carrots on Wednesday night when I picked him up en route to a veg talk at North Derby DA. My long and stump carrots are well ahead of his. I also saw his shallots which, whilst impressive, were quite a bit smaller than last season so it seems even the best growers are having an abnormal year.

I'm also hoping to have better luck with runner beans this season and have gone to extra efforts in the construction of my bean fence. I've used steel rods for bean poles as it's impossible to purchase 10' canes these days. The two wooden cross supports have holes drilled in them so the steel rods are merely passed through without any need for tying. It can all be easily dismantled and stored away for the winter. What's more this baby aint going nowhere in high winds and will also act as a windbreak for my 2011 National Champion winning peas just behind them.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction

One of the downsides of being one of the best looking men in the World is that God sees fit to counteract your facial good fortune by bestowing all manner of pestilence and disease upon thee!

He has populated the Earth with many creatures that appear to serve no useful purpose and chief among these in my opinion is the flying rat otherwise known as the wood pigeon. Many years ago I planted my cabbages out and nipped back inside for a quick cup of tea before netting to keep the buggers at bay. I'd been gone no more than 10 minutes but when I returned my brassicas had been stripped and a couple of pigeons were hurriedly trying to take off so fat were they having consumed all my hard work!

I'd planted out these kohl rabi with a view to trying to get them ready for the show in July when I found this scene of carnage the other night.

I should have known better than to plant them without protection but nethertheless it still pisses you off when you see it. My favoured method of deterrent is some string above the plants with some old CD's dangling down just above the plants. I was told a few years ago that pigeons don't like to see things above them and whenever i've done this I've never had problems with them so it does appear to work despite the plants still being easily accessible if they so wished to take another gobble. Bastards.

The Casablanca potatoes that i'm growing in pots also have these strange brown speckles on the foliage.

I asked Dave Thornton what they might be but he was as much use as a chocolate teapot, sending the picture text as I did whilst he was on a night out with friends. He was so pissed that he text me back saying that he loved me! I never did find out from him what these marks are so I'll just have to hope they're not significant as these spuds will be coming up in a week or two. In the meantime Dave has decided to choose Llangollen to finally come out of the closet!

On Friday it was time to sow my 'Prince' french beans with a view to having them ready for Llangollen which is now only 11 weeks away. There is a right way up to sow beans and I always seem to get 100% germination when I do it this way. If you look at the 'scar' on the bean you should see what look like two small bollocks at the bottom of it. The beans should be sown this way up, with the bollocks towards the bottom. Kinda makes sense when you say it like that really!

My leeks are looking better than any I've had at this time of the year and I've now put them on their first collars, which are 12" tall, and have run a couple of horizontal supports alongside the plants to support the flags. I've also sprayed them with Dynamec to ward off thrips which have rendered my leeks useless for anything other than local showing in recent years. The thrips inhabit the growing point of the leek, hiding right inside the new growth emerging from the 'button'. So therefore you have to use a high pressure spray to really force the insecticide inside the leaf layers. Spraying over the outer foliage will have no effect whatsoever.

I sat next to Mark Roberts at a DA talk the other night and he wore the self-satisfied smile of someone who had some exceptional leeks growing away. I've seen photos of his Nuneaton plot on Facebook and they really were something to behold, and Mark was hoping to win the National again for the collection of 6 as he did in 2007. Later that night he text me in a dejected state as he'd got back to find just about all of his leeks had gone to seed. Back in Winter some jealous twat had got into his garden and switched off his power. Presumably his plants got a check that night which meant they were doomed from that point on. I hope that person is proud of himself and suffers a premature end to life.

Oh, and as I speak it's absolutely wazzing down outside. Severn Trent......any chance you might actually catch some of it?

And remember the golden rule of life.....

Let the ridicule begin....

I harvested my first large shallot today at 44mm. Not as big as I would have liked but as big as I'm going to get them this season. The other night at the North Mids NVS DA meeting most people were reporting their shallots coming early because of the warm Spring.

My stump carrots Sweet Candle under enviromesh covers continue to give me the raging horn but after the last couple of seasons I'm not suffering from premature excitement in case they all end up fanged again.

Most of my potatoes are now through having not been sown until early May. The Casablanca are most advanced, the 5 bags on the left being a foot high. The others were sown a week after the first 5.



The 4 pots of Casablanca that I sowed 13 weeks ago with a small village show in July in mind are still growing strongly. I had a furtive furtle around the compost and felt the odd decent sized tuber. I will stop watering now and let the foliage wilt a bit with a view to cutting off the haulms in a fortnight or two. I'm told casablanca should have reached size by now but as it's a small village show i'm not too worried if I end up with large spuds. It will give me an idea when to harvest my bags in July/August.

I also hope to have some courgettes for the same show, the variety 'Cora' which I am going to be growing up against the stout posts. I tried this method last year after seeing NVS Southern Branch Chairman Barry Newman (top chap...getting my vote for NVS Chairman when Medwyn steps down in August!) write about this in the NVS magazine a couple of years ago. It means the plant takes up a smaller footprint in the soil (you can grow other things in the freed-up space) and the fruit are carried at the top of the plant, are easily picked and usually free from marks on the skins. As the lower leaves get old or mildewy you can cut them off and keep the plant looking fresh. Labour intensive but it seemed to work. I've got another 6 plants just germinated which I will grow in the same way for later shows such as Malvern and Westminster.

And now for the moment some of you have been waiting for. I'm getting strangely pestered to post a photo of my Kelsae onions on here. Admittedly I haven't shown them for a while as they haven't really done much whilst I know other growers up and down the country have onions the size of bull's bollocks already. Mine may not be humungous due to my lack of facilities (lighting and warmth in Winter) but i'm quite happy with them (sown from seed in January) and thanks to regular spraying with a thrip spray I have no sign of pest damage yet. I know i'm being set up for less than complimentary commentary so here goes....do your worst you bastards!

I pay my water rates = I turn on my tap = I use my water that I have paid for

And nothing, I repeat nothing is going to stop me doing that!

In other words Severn Trent fuck off and sort out all the leaks and stop wasting our time with threats of hosepipe bans.

And before you send up your Gestapo helicopters i'm not stupid enough to water my lawn!

D-Day.....or P-Day to be precise!

Well the day finally arrived yesterday when I had to sow my peas with Llangollen in mind. Whether I'll actually be able to get 12 pods worthy of going on the bench alongside the efforts of Andrew Jones, Jim Thompson, Ian Simpson and current National champion Ian Stocks only time will tell but it won't be for want of trying.

A couple of weeks ago I dug out a deep trench and lined it with some well-rotted horse manure. A wire was run between two posts and twenty two 8' canes were attached to this 10" apart using special clips that made the job a very easy one.

It is at this point that my Scottish friends will now be pissing themselves with laughter. 'Linda, will yae ken what that wee saxon eejit is trying to dae noo!'

Yes I know....only 22 plants when you're growing 120, and only 10" apart when Ian Simpson recommends 18" to stop pods getting damaged. I may have lofty ambitions but I never said I wasn't stupid, and for now I only have room for this one row. But as I managed to win the Midlands with only 14 tomato plants so I shall give this one small row all the tender loving care it's possible for a man to give! I'm hoping they'll respond to the extra cossetting they're going to get and that I'll be able to keep on top of such a small number and give myself maximum chance come August. Besides, if mildew attacks it will be easier to spray a few rather than many. It will also be easier to pull them all up if the experiment fails!

I sowed 15 peas yesterday and will sow another 15 in 4 days time, planting out the best 11 from each batch. Come on my babies!

I hate to say it but I'm getting really concerned about my tomatoes. The yellowing foliage on the bottom leaves doesn't seem to be getting better despite a couple of sprays with epsom salts and a watering with calcium. I noticed the problem a couple of weeks ago but wasn't too concerned at first as it was confined to the bottom set of leaves only. Now it has advanced to the next two sets of leaves up and something is patently not right. Tomatoes can be funny things and take a while to get themselves balanced out so I'm hoping all will be well eventually.

And at last my long beet is now all through, although the ones that germinated a few weeks ago will be way ahead of those that have only just germinated, so getting a matching set may well be a tall order.

Thanks to regular sprayings with Decis there are no caterpillars on my brassicas as yet and these Brigadier and red cabbages 'Rodeo' are about the best i've ever had at this stage. I put the black membrane beneath them to keep the lower leaves off the soil. It allows water through but keeps weeds down.

Carmen verandah

My first three cucumber seedlings 'Carmen' are starting to show the first true leaves so will need planting out in 2 or 3 weeks. I'm growing them a different way this season, in growbags on this raised platform. The idea is that they'll only need to grow vertically for a couple of foot or so before I can start training them horizontally along the greenhouse eaves at eye level and above. In this way I can hang the fruits down and therefore away from the coarse foliage that can mark the skins.

This is similar to the way Charlie Maisey grows his. It was a bit of a fiddle making the framework but I've made it so that it all comes apart and can be stored away in the garage against a wall at the end of the season. I can also still grow the long and stump carrots plus some onions below it in the greenhouse border soil. It means I will have to be a bit of a contortionist to get in and out of my greenhouse once everything is fully grown but being the superb physical athlete that I am it shouldn't be too much of a problem.