♫Starting a landslide in my ego.....♫

There's very little you can do from now on to affect the colour of card you're going to get (if any) come show day. There are still a few weeks to go now until my main show season although i may well be tempted to have a go at Bakewell on Wednesday depending on how well my grandson Oscar's 6 hour hour cochlear implant operation goes on Tuesday. Otherwise I will have to wait until Llangollen and it now becomes a time of stress and self-doubt not knowing how good your long roots and potatoes are going to turn out. But this is a 'place' we all have to go through in order to get to a better place. It's a bit like Aberdeen in that respect.

There is a lot of growth to be done yet on things like beans and cucumbers. My Carmen cus are starting to stretch out across the greenhouse and are being tied to the horizontal wires above my head as they go.

I've been picking off any fruits forming in the first three feet of main stem, and have now left my first fruit to carry on growing. It's a nice straight looking fruit growing at the right position in the leaf axil so should hang down and grow away unhindered. This will probably be up to size in three weeks but may keep for Llangollen. I have three plants at 3' long and another couple at a foot or so for later shows.

My onions have been a bit of a disaster this season, starting with my non-germination problems in January with Vento. In the end I managed to get some Vento plants and grew some in 7" pots in the greenhouse. The first ones are now approaching 3.25" dia. so I press any split skins down to the compost surface so the first complete skin will ripen in the sun and any ribbing will disappear.

With my large onions in mind for next season I have plans to acquire my dad's 10'x7' greenhouse and have earmarked a spot in the garden to locate it. I will never be able to grow decent onions whilst i'm growing them next to and in amongst other crops so I have decided to dedicate some proper growing space to them. All I have to do now is convince my dad he doesn't need the greenhouse anymore and that he should let me have it!

I have now decided to stop watering the Casablanca potatoes growing in bags in the bed in the foreground as they have been in for 13 weeks. This will ensure that the lenticals on the potatoes will shut down and hopefully I won't get compost trapped in the pores which show up as black dots and are impossible to wash out. In a week I will cut the haulms back and indeed they have already started to go yellow indicating to me that it is time to think about getting them up. I will then cover the bags with polythene to make sure no rain can get at them. I'm a little trepidacious about my spuds as I've had a fiddle in the compost in the bags and have been struggling to locate any decent sized tubers. I just hope they're in there somewhere.

And my Blyton Belle marrows planted against stout supports have now got their roots down and started to grow, meaning I can soon start tying them into the post. I'll let them go up for a couple of feet then let them run horizontally so that the fruits hang down. They were all planted on a good dollop of wet horse manure.

I'm very pleased with how my Evening Star celery are progressing. Although the sticks are still a bit narrow i'm sure they'll start to bulk out soon. The foliage is very large and clean and I have the best part of two months growth until I intend to show any, possibly at Malvern and Harrogate. I sowed these on February 20th and with the amount of feed and water they have had I would have hoped for bulkier plants by now but it has been a case of slow and steady growth so hopefully this will pay off in the end. A former National champion says I have nothing to worry about so that's good enough for me.

More essential Smithyveg travel advice

No foreign holiday this year so i'm doing my annual report this time around on our short trip to London!

1) 25 years ago I visited Paris and London in quick succession and Paris absolutely put London to shame. I'm happy to report we now have a Capital to be proud of. Magnificent buildings and streets all spruced up in time for the Olympics. A little known gem i'd thoroughly recommend is The Monument on the north end of London Bridge. In honour of the Great Fire it has 311 steps and magnificent views across the city.
2) You will feel like a foreigner in your own country. All service staff, hotel and restaurant workers can barely speak english. I just kept smiling and nodding, my wife and youngest daughter would ask me what they said and I had to reply every time "not a soddin' clue".
3) The tube system is magnificent. It's a testament to the Victorians as most of it was laid down over a century ago and looks as rock solid as ever. And you have to be an absolute cretin not to be able to travel across the city on it as it's so logical and easy to use. I managed it and i'm 50% cretin!
4) It is a fact that the couple sardined into the tube carriage next to you will feel an overwhelming desire to spread saliva over each other's faces, stopping just short of actual fornication. I seemed to be the only person on the tube who found this disconcerting.
5) There are many, many gay men in London. I could tell this as they all had overshoulder satchels which is a 100% indicator in my book. When Jeremy Clarkson comes to power and installs me as Home Secretary I am going to have them all roughed up and forced to eat fanny.
6) The majority of women in London are butt ugly. It's probably why there are so many gay men.
7) Why does The Theatre Royal advertise itself as being on Drury Lane when in fact it is on f***ing Catherine Street? A little tip.....put Theatre Royal, Catherine Street on the ticket and spare twats like me some unnecessary leg work as then we'll actually be able to find it! We nearly had to ask a gay man for directions!
8) People who work in the city are very rude and very fast. Those that kept barging into me and knocking my map out of my hand to the floor would have got a slap if they hadn't already been a dot in the distance by the time i'd picked it up!
9) For a gardening extravaganza head to Regent's Park or St. James's Park. The bedding displays are an assault on the senses but be prepared for men holding hands a la George Michael, the dirty buggers. My wife had to keep telling me to stop growling and gnashing my teeth.
10) The Olympics will be magnificent. But something at the back of my head keeps telling me another Anders Breivik lunatic or 7/7 nutcase will grab all the headlines. Total security is a fallacy.

Overall I wasn't particularly looking forward to it, but I'd certainly go back soon. We shunned Madame Tussauds as there was a ridiculous 3 hour wait and I quite enjoyed the second half of Shrek. I fell asleep during the first bit!

Viva London. I'll be back in October for the Westminster Show

♫I was speeding through the subway......♫

We're currently in London for a few days doing the tourist thing. I have to say the place is looking a whole lot smarter than I remember although there is still a lot of frantic activity presumably with the Olympics in mind. Let's hope they award the Games to Huddersfield before too long!

Yesterday we went on the London Eye which was well worth the wait and the cost. Today it's Madame Tussauds where most of the dummies still have more life than Messrs Unsworth and Bastow. Then tonight we're going to see Shrek the musical. I understand Dave Thornton has a leading role in this.

And well done to Darren Blick who won Southern Branch yesterday with long carrots in his first ever show which is some achievement when you consider that the great Jim Thompson was 2nd.

♫At the moment of surrender......♫

♫Walk, walk, walk with me to the water......♫

I've got 8 days off work now and apart from a short trip into the hellhole that is London for a short break for a bit of museum visiting and a musical, I shall be spending many hours titivating my crops and tying my shallots.

Yesterday however, I took the opportunity to get some fresh air in my lungs and did a walk in Staffordshire called 'The Roaches' which is a 1600' ridge with some amazing rock formations. Starting near the village of Flash (aaaahaaaaaah) which is the highest in Britain me and a pal walked to Tittesworth (snigger) reservoir and back via Hen Cloud and the very jagged Ramshaw Rocks.

The Winking Man can be seen quite clearly from the road below as you drive past and is a popular local landmark.

But out of all the weird rock shapes I was most taken by this one. "Medwyyyyyn. He's being rude again!"

Right so that's mind and body fully recharged now for some garden therapy.

♫There's nothing you have that I need, I can breathe......♫

♫Who's gonna ride your wild horses......♫

The 'wild horses' refers to my good lady when she came home the other night to see me using her best saucepan to boil up my mare's tail brew mildew treatment for my quickly faltering peas. How was I to know? One saucepan looks much like another to me! Anyway, surely a bit of stewed weed is no different to boiled carrots, mashed potatoes etc?

Moving on, just in case it turns out that I may have erred in declaring that I was going to become National pea champion (we shall have to see but my plants seem to have taken on a pallour that suggests I may be struggling to get a set of peas good enough to be benched alongside the best in the Isle) I have decided today that I will instead win with french beans which are altogether much less fussy and easier to grow. For the past 6 weeks I have been sowing 12 seeds per week and then planting up into 12" pots filled with my own sieved compost from the heap. I now have about 15 of these pots planted up and I shall also support the plants with pea sticks and string to keep them upright.

It means I can bring the pots indoors nearer showday so that none of the beans are likely to get blemished by the weather. I have another tray of beans ready for planting, another tray just germinated and will sow my last tray of 12 this weekend which should more than cover me all the way through to Westminster Show in early October which is now only 10 weeks away.

Here is last years National winning set of french beans at Dundee. Note the outstanding uniformity, straightness, lack of bean bulge and good colour. Perhaps i'd best stick to radishes!

♫ Don't let the bastards grind you down♪

I'm referring of course to the Scottish pea growing clan who have already started their dirty tricks campaign with their comments on my legume growing skills designed to undermine me and make me doubt my own brilliant horticultural expertise. You may well encounter such subterfuge at your own village shows when the local old boy who has won for many years will try and chip away at you with acerbic comments. You have to try and be thick skinned like me. Stupid is another word often used to describe me. When I say 'clan' I mean one bloke in particular who just happens to be current National champion and who Gob Almighty here has challenged to a pea growing duel in the Wild-West suburbs of Llangollen. Next year i'm thinking of challenging Peter Clark on blanch leeks, Graham Watson on long carrots and Sherie Plumb on spuds. I mean....how hard can it be?


During exchanges of banter i've mentioned to Mr. Ian Stocks of Scottishland that I've had a few problems with viruses on my peas. We've had an explosion of aphids down here and peas are one of their favourite dishes. Once they pierce the outer flesh of the pea leaves and start sucking the sap they can pass on all manner of weird foliage distorting viruses and I've had 4 plants out of my 22 that had good green colouring for the bottom 10" or so then went all pallid and sickly looking above that. I've had no alternative but to cut back to below this and try and grow a sideshoot from the green growth, but of course it's thrown out my timings and means I now have only 18 plants from which to get my 12 pods for the National. Still those plants are growing away very strongly and Mr. S tells me they are at height they should be.

He also says that he doesn't get aphid damage in the land of the tartan manskirt so things really are weighted against us southerners as they get mildew a lot later than us also. Talking of mildew, whilst the wife is out tonight I intend boiling up my special mare's tail brew (which has now dried out - see below) and start to spray up from the bottom of my plants in order to try and prevent mildew before it strikes. It means my dad may be seeing more of me as I raid his garden and the railway embankment next to him for shoots of this weed as each stew will only last a couple of weeks before I need to produce some more.

Last night I got my first email blight warning of the season for my area as there'd been a sustained period of warm humid weather (called the Smith Period!) creating the right conditions for the blight spores to start exploding into the atmosphere and dropping onto your spud foliage. Without further ado I mixed up some Dithane and gave all my potato leaves a good spraying which should protect them for the time being. Dithane has been taken off the market so after i've used my remaining two sachets i'll need to find an alternative product for next season and i'm informed that Bayer have produced one called 'Fruit and Veg Disease Control' so I may well look at that one. Remember to spray any outdoor tomatoes as these are in the same plant family as potatoes and will also get hit. Dithane gives the leaves this white powdery appearance.

Talking of tomatoes my replacement Cedrico plants in the greenhouse have really motored since being planted at the end of June so I'm more than confident of having some to defend my Malvern crown at least.

Whatever happens I'm probably the most incompetent tomato grower ever to win that class and I wish I'd bit the bullet earlier and replaced them as soon as I started getting problems. If I had I would probably have been able to get some in time for Llangollen although I did leave one plant that seemed to have recovered from its early chill and I may yet be able to get 4 fruits for the Millenium Class. You live and learn and I'll know not to even consider planting earlier than May Day from now on. This is how my greenhouse looked at the very same stage last year. It's enough to make you consider taking up stamp collecting.

My first sowing of Stenner runner beans are really romping away up my sturdy bean fence, with a second sowing now about a foot high timed for the later shows. After several years of rushed attempts at creating a more robust bean fence that has ultimately blown down or just not been up to the task I created this masterpiece of macklement using drilled wooden beams and steel rods, with inclined posts slotted into steel box section sleaves driven several feet into the ground. If this gets blown over now it will actually take a large chunk of the planet with it.

So proliferous are the flowers on these plants that I need to start looking into how to grow runner beans for show properly. I'm sure Mrs. Plumb and Mr. Maisey cut surplus beans from the trusses so any advice on this subject would be greatly appreciated. What I do know is that the ground needs to be kept moist at all times so each night I'm going up the row and watering these and the peas that are growing a couple of feet away from them. Both are planted into deep fertile soil above a trench of well rotted horse muck.

So the plants are growing, the pests and diseases are multiplying, the showdate is approaching and my esteemed adversaries all have the knowledge and experience. As Bonio Dogbiscuit would say ♫It's not a hiiiiill it's a mountaaaain......♫

♫ Baby slow down, the end is not as fun as the start ♪

For the next few weeks I'm going to be using lines from U2 songs as my post headings, without doubt the World's best ever band when they stick to music and not all that saving Aung San Suu Kyi shite. If she's daft enough to take on a military dictatorship on her tod that's her problem!

But this lyric highlights how you should be feeling about your plot at this stage of the season. Too many of us want the shows to come around when you should be sitting back and reflecting on your hard work and admiring the tapestry you've painted. Show time marks an end to your season and in many ways is quite a sad time, especially if you haven't done as well as you'd hoped. But at the beginning of the season everyone is equal and the bare ground is full of promise and you can imagine your trophy shelves straining under the weight come September. So enjoy the next month or so before the shows start.

Looking around this morning as I walked the plot with cuppa in hand I had to agree with myself that overall my stuff looks better than it ever has done, testament to the advice I get from fellow growers on the NVS forum. I'm struggling to find any blemishes on my Brigadier cabbages but I need them to start hearting up now. I'm hoping to take a pair of these to Malvern with me.

My celery are now on 21" cardboard collars and the individual stalks are now starting to put on a bit of bulk. Again I may well be tempted to stage a brace at Malvern for comparison purposes and then at Westminster a few days later. No-one really grows celery round here for local shows but if you've got a good pair of 'sticks' you can put these in the any other veg class and they'll take a lot of beating.

My roots continue to grow well with amazing tops, from my Sweet Candle stumps that are bursting out of the enviromesh.....

....to my parsnips 'Polar' which I'm getting more and more pleased about. This year i've supported the heavy foliage with pea sticks and string as it can rub against the tops of the drums in high winds and last year several leaves were slice leaves right off, so i'm working on the principal that more leaves = bigger roots.

When Dave T visited me a couple of weeks ago he said he's never seen long beet foliage as big as mine at the end of the season let alone early July. These are actually forcing themselves out of the growing media which i'm told is quite normal for long beet so i'm topping the drums up with compost to stop the shoulders going corky. Again I may be tempted to stage a set of three at Malvern as there are never that many entries and I may have an outside chance of getting a ticket if the bottoms are anywhere near as good as the tops.

My Pendle blanch leeks are now on 19" collars and are by far the best leeks I've ever had at this point in the season. Considering how I struggled to get fairly puny plants through November and December in the coldest weather ever experienced around here in a makeshift growing chamber I reckon i've done bloody well with these. I thought I absolutely had to lose some if not all to going to seed but so far all is good.

So everything in the veg garden is looking pretty good even if I say so myself.

This year I'm even growing a few vegetables in amongst this long border near the house where I grow dahlias and other flowers for various vase classes at local shows. There is sweetcorn 'Miracle' although I've had to spray against rust in the last few days and they do seem to be responding. I also have some butternut squashes trailing along the ground, broad beans, parsley, kohl rabi and swiss chard (burnt Roger Federer).

And this is the view back down the garden. Our cats no longer come into the house since the dog tried to eat them both. And before Bill Oddie starts bleating we do leave the shed open for them at night!

So, when all is good sit back and smell the flowers........such as these lilies, which were supposed to be September flowering. Salesmen eh? Scumbags. I'll end today's post on another U2 lyric. Life should be fragrant, rooftop to the basement.

Wow! The Red Arrows!

This was one of the questions I came up with when my local hort soc asked me to arrange a quiz for our annual Christmas Party a few years ago. No-one got the answer which was 'courgettes'. Cor! Jets! Geddit? They never asked me to do another, although I seem to remember everyone got 'Burnt Roger Federer perhaps?' Any guesses for that one anybody?


Anyways, this leads me on in a roundabout sort of fashion to courgettes and marrows in general. I have 7 courgette plants growing this season in order to give me a goodly selection of 6" long fruits come Westminster Show amongst others, a class I fully intend to win along with radishes. As anyone will know when you grow courgettes you are rewarded with so many fruits that you cannot give them away. We are currently having courgettes with every meal although the courgettes and weetabix took a bit of getting down. Our grandson Oscar is having many, many courgettes indeed mashed into his food which is making his poo very green. That's if we can actually get it into his gob rather than over his face and body! He's due to have a 6 hour op to install cochlear implants any time soon. Then he'll be able to hear the rubbish his grandad talks incessantly.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I grow my courgettes against a stout post and train the plant up as soon as the growing point starts to 'go'. Rather than unruly, scrambly plants sprawling over the ground they end up very tidy and almost standard grown. The lower leaves usually succumb to mildew so these are cut off and I can plant other crops below them....crops such as even more radishes or kohl rabi. The plants are still quite low but are now starting to elongate meaning I can tie them every couple of inches to encourage them upwards. By the end of the summer the fruits can be harvested at just above testicle height.

The variety i've decided to grow this season is Cora which has already given me some very uniform and straight fruits. When cutting them, cut as much stalk as you can and take a sliver off this at the show with a sharp knife so it 'bleeds' sap and looks nice and fresh. You can start cutting two or three days before your show. Also retain the flower and stage them side by side to highlight uniformity, although you may find those harvested a few days before will obviously lose freshness in the actual flower.

For the past few years I've not been able to grow any decent marrows, due to illness in 2009 (I nearly died from swine man-flu you know!) and bad seed in 2010. This year is going to be different. Yesterday I planted out 3 plants on a goodly dollop of wet horse muck against a stout post. The plant will be trained up the post for a couple of feet and then along horizontal ones so that the fruits hang down much as I'm doing with cucumbers. Like cu's, marrows have very coarse foliage and you cannot allow them to scratch the skins of the developing marrows when they're small. If you do then a small scratch will be like a huge scar by the time the marrow is at full size. Growing in this way also allows light all round and means you do not get the yellowy or discoloured side that you would get if you grew them along the ground. Marrows for exhibition should be between 12 and 15" and are usually called for as a pair. Most plants will only give you 3 or 4 decent fruits if you're lucky so I will be planting another 3 plants in the next few days.

These are my marrows from Malvern in 2009 which came just out of the tickets!

Problems with wind

In response to a fellow blogger Dickie Nine Inch (he likes those fairground mirrors that distort everything) from Kent who is having trouble keeping his onions erect in high winds, this is a perennial problem and you need to take precautions when growing onions outside if you want to harvest nice symmetrical bulbs that aren't lop-sided. If the neck of the onion is blown over it effectively ceases to grow thereafter, as the soft tissue inside the stem will undoubtedly have been damaged. You have a couple of options but both necessitate supporting your foliage.

This season I've tried growing some of my onions for the 250g class in the greenhouse in pots. This gives you the advantage of not suffering from wind damage at all but I was still finding the weight of the foliage pulls the bulb over to one side and a cane a green clip is required to keep things growing gun-barrel straight upwards. So far I'm having mixed success with this method and need to give it some more thought. My Vento are very slow to start bulbing up and I think the foliage isn't big enough to get them even up to the 250g size. I also tried some red onions this way but they were a total waste of time. The foliage looked good but I ended up with bulbs barely golf ball size. No doubt it's to do with the mix, but as it was a last minute decision as an experiment I filled each pot with equal parts compost, soil and vermiculite with some Vitax Q4 and Nutrimate. I shall have to take some more guidance because as a method it undoubtedly has merit, and has the added advantage of there being no chance I will suffer from white rot as I used was sterilised bagged soil.

But the majority of my onions for the 250g classes are still growing away in a raised bed outside, most of them the mysterious variety 'Frisco' which seems to be doing ok so far. I have had white rot in this bed in the past and despite sterilising with Basamid I have lost a couple already I noticed yesterday. I also support these plants with a small green cane and clip and despite some quite high winds blowing through the Smithyveg plot in recent days they all remain upright and proud, and therefore still growing away!

I had a call last week from the NVS legend of this class, Ron McFarlane who in his day was unbeatable with the variety Toughball. He was very surprised when I told him I had not yet harvested my 250g onions as his had been up a week, but then he is about 150 miles further south-west from me in Wales. It is quite surprising and enlightening to talk to different growers around the country to hear tales of vegetables being way advanced to mine but then I had to remind myself that I have always started my showing from the end of August and very rarely entered shows earlier than that. My timings are all worked out accordingly. The last couple of years I have entered a village show in early July and grown a few crops specifically for it but this has been unusual. As far as i'm concerned my 250g onions have always started to bulb up from around now and I've started harvesting them when they reach size from the end of July and into August. It means the skin finish is not very ripe for the early shows but they soon improve during early to mid-September and I managed a 3rd at Westminster in early October and also at Derby in late October.

I may well be tempted to enter at Bakewell Show on the 4th August but there will be no way I shall have any onions ready for that. If i'm going to start extending my showing season I shall have to think about the way I grow my onions and this can only be improved by giving them better growing conditions at the front end of the season, namely more warmth and light.


It's about this time of the year that everything on the plot looks near enough spot-on. Thanks to my NVS membership I'm able to take advantage of cut price offers on insecticides and fungicides that you simply cannot buy in the garden centres and the foliage on my crops is looking truly exceptional as a result.

Most years at this time I go on holiday and it's therefore about now that things start to get out of hand as I rely on someone else to do watering duties. There really is no substitute for being on hand yourself to spot things as they start to go wrong or better still act to prevent things going wrong. However, this year we're not going away on holiday as instead I've decided to work through my holiday entitlement in order to pay more tax so that the teachers can retire at 55 on a mega-pension bless 'em. The butterflies keep flitting over my brassicas but because they've been sprayed regularly with Decis they really don't seem to like it and i'm struggling to find the usual clusters of eggs under the leaves. I'm only finding the odd single egg instead. Does anyone know how Decis works?


There's been a real explosion of aphids in the country and Leicestershire is no exception. One of my pea plants is a strange mix of clean green growth for the bottom 10" then a mottled, twisty yellow growth above that which I'm assuming is as a result of a virus passed on by aphids sucking the sap.

I've asked for advice on this from National pea champion Ian Stocks whose title I will be taking in a few weeks time but had no reply yet as i'm tempted to cut the virussy bit off and grow a side shoot up the cane from the good green bit. I can only assume he doesn't want to tell me how to beat him so I will act under my own intuition...always a dangerous thing I find.

Carmen controlled

As i'm not a teacher spending my lunchtimes eating lentil biscuits and plotting with my colleagues on how best to fuck up our childrens' futures next, I have to go home each day to make sure my plants are ticking over nicely in this hot weather. At lunchtime today I had to do a quick repair job on my cucumber plants which are now about 18" tall and had flopped over in the pots on their raised growing platform. I'd been putting off the job of making something to tie them to along the greenhouse eaves as there are just so many multitudinous little jobs that need doing at the moment, mainly watering. Some thin wire was hastily stretched across the greenhouse tied to some holes in the aliminium at each end and the plants will be tied to this at regular intervals, not too tightly so that they are effectively being suspended by loops of soft string. As my greenhouse is only 8' long i'm hoping to be able to return the plants so that they come back along their neighbour's wire up the other way, giving me double the amount of stem length and therefore more fruits to choose from. It'll be fiddly but hopefully worth the hassle.

Plants of that size will require a lot of water and at the moment i'm giving them a high nitrogen feed so that I get strong lush plants very quickly. Any tiny fruits developing in these first few feet of main stem are being pinched out and discarded, a little tip I picked up from Charlie Maisey. I've always been pretty unbeatable in village shows with cucumbers so I'm hoping to be able to get a set of 3 at Llangollen to compare against the current masters such as Trevor Last, Sherie Plumb and Graham Watson. I cannot afford any scratches on the skins so the fruits will be hanging down below the foliage, meaning I shall have to walk into my greenhouse very carefully to avoid a headbanging. Also, they should be straighter by growing them this way. Ideally you need to transport the fruits to the shows with the dried up flower still attached to the end, although in the past I have successfully superglued these back on! This is Grahan Watson's winning entry from the 2007 National at Malvern. Truly perfick!

Another top Maisey tip is to give the cu's a spray with icy water on the show bench just before the judges enter, to give them that fresh, crisp, 'just-picked' look. So that's something else I shall have to remember to take with me to Wales, along with my passport and sheep-worrying exemption certificate.

Horse's ass weed harries on

After my blinding success with peas at the weekend i'm now motoring towards a red card at Llangollen. All 22 plants are now in situ, the first plantings being about 2' tall. You really do have to watch them like a hawk from now on as they grow so quickly and need tying to the canes at regular intervals. If you don't do this they're liable to flap about in the breeze and snap off or bend and once that happens they'll never make a decent plant in time for your show. You also need to snip off all tendrils. This is so that all the plants energy goes into producing nice strong pea pods but also so that they don't twine round the developing pods and ruin their form and shape.

One major problem with growing peas beyond mid-August of course is that mildew strikes and takes hold of the plants very quickly which will ruin all your preparations and hard work. A remedy offered up by John Trim on the NVS forum is to make a spray from a concoction of a pernicious wasteland weed called mare's tail. This is supposed to combat mildew so I've been on the lookout for some plants for the past few weeks. Normally finding some mare's tail is as easy as finding a teacher with his head up his own arse, they really are ten-a-penny. But could I spot any this year? Could I heck!



Then yesterday I was at my step mum's birthday party in my dad's back garden which backs onto the Midland Mainline. I'd picked a few small shoots out of his lawn but then I noticed some larger plants growing over the wall on the railway embankment. Everyone was agog as I straddled the wall precariously trying to pluck the precious weeds, but I was happy to end up with a plastic bag full.

The method?


Pick & allow to dry until brown & crisp. Take 2oz & add to 4 pints of water. Bring to the boil in a saucepan & simmer for 20 minutes. Strain the brew & add enough water to make the mix up to 2 gallons. You are now ready to spray. The brew will keep for up to 2 weeks. Preventative spray every 10 to 14 days at half strength.




If you are in a rush because you have an outbreak of mildew, you can use fresh mares tail but double the amount, i.e 4oz fresh in 4 pints of water, then proceed as above.


Let's hope it works after all the effort!


Like most parts of the country we haven't had any rain to speak of for months (I think it went on f***ing strike for having to work outside at all times with no cold weather bonuses) so getting enough water to my spuds is one heck of a chore. I'm only growing 4 varieties this year, about 15 bags of each, my thinking being that watering such a relatively small amount would be easier. But you can't skimp on the water so each watering can will only do about 3 bags and you need to be keeping them moist at all times in this weather, so that's a lot of trips back and forth to the water butts for my little dwarf legs.


A lack of or deluge of water at specific times can lead to a number of problems so it really is critical to growing good shaped spuds with no blemishes. Frequent shallow watering is best in the long run. An early season deficit will reduce your ultimate yield. A late season deficit will reduce quality. Infrequent watering will give you tuber malformation rendering them no good for showing and a deluge after a deficit will cause your spuds to crack.

My spud foliage this season is very healthy looking but quite small and squat which i'm assuming is the plants' reaction to the exceptionally hot weather we've been having. NVS Amour and NVS Sherine in particular are very puny compared to other varieties growing next to them. In the photo NVS Sherine is on the right. The bed on the left is Casablanca and these bags have been in for nine weeks now.

I reckon I need to give Casablanca at least 12 weeks so i'll continue watering for another couple of weeks then stop watering and let them dry out if possible and the haulms die back naturally. If rain is forecast I'll cover them over with some polythene. This allows the skin lenticels to shut down and should prevent the little black dots you often get on your potatoes that just won't wash out. The Casablanca I exhibited at the weekend were allowed to dry out in their pots in the sun and they really did clean up a dream.

Here we go again!

It doesn't seem 5 minutes since I was washing veg for my last show last October but this weekend was my first show of this season in the Notts village of Keyworth. And I picked up my first red cards of the season as well as trophies for most points in the veg section and the best veg or fruit exhibit.

I had plenty of good globe beet 'Pablo' to choose from. These were grown in the ground but I still managed to extract reasonably long thin tap roots which is about as likely as finding a teacher with a sense of humour. My globe beet for the big shows are being grown in deep raised beds with finely sieved compost to ensure long thin taps.

I was very happy with the way these Casablanca spuds cleaned up. They were absolutely gleaming and didn't have a blemish of any description on them anywhere. I hope my main sowings in the bags come up like these and hopefully bigger. These were only about 4oz so they were very small....but good enough to win.

Best veg went to my carrots Caradec. I was very disappointed with these when I pulled them.....they should be stumps! A lady approached me at the end and said she thought they were amazing. If only she knew! Still they cleaned up very well and hopefully my remaining roots of this variety growing in some small tubes on a greenhouse border will develop a stump end in due course!

I also won the class calling for a tray of garden produce. I arranged this at the show myself with absolutely no help on this occasion from Leesa. Waddya mean...'it shows!'...???





And here is another result that i'm sure will have my Scottish friends shitting themselves as I walked off with a third for peas. I think I was beaten by the local hairdresser and butcher! As I work in sales and marketing I'll put a positive spin on it by saying '2011 National pea champion gets creditable third in his National build-up'. No....I'm not buying it either!

One side point on that....all the pods only had 7 peas in them. There are three possible reasons for this.

1) I'm a shite grower (unlikely)

2) I didn't grow them very well (possibly)

3) I've been shafted!

And finally every now and again it comes to your attention that there are some really sad, lonely individuals out there. Some people may not agree with some of the things I say on here but this is my little blog, where I can say what I like when I like on subjects that get my gander. I know that won't change the World but it changes the World in me and makes me feel a little bit better for saying it. I was once accused of being racist for publishing a photo of some martians carrying a banner declaring "Muslims f*** off!" It had been sent to me by an asian friend. I have many asian friends. My neighbours are asian. My grandson is half-caste. The photo was simply funny. Period! I know there is a difference between my indian friends and muslims but there was no difference between the photo reading "Muslims f*** off or "Scots f*** off" or "Welsh f*** off!" etc etc. In this PC World we supposed to be careful about what we say and do. Well not this Brit baby. And if you really cannot stomach what I say there's this magic little cross in the top right hand corner of your computer screen, and if you press it I f*** off as if by magic.

So, it made me laugh today to think that someone could go to such lengths to stop me from doing something that would ultimately benefit them and their organisation just because they took such offence at my views. Something I'd been asked to do because no-one else seemed to want to do it and I was relucantly persuaded to give it a go to help them out. That person must now think i'm gutted to be denied. Well i'm not. I shall now have four weekends a year back again to do what I want rather than have to spend them bombing up the motorway to boring meetings, and I'll be able to spend countless evenings sowing, planting, spraying and cropping rather writing minutes. Don't bother asking me ever again.

  

Monster!

Just when you think you've seen everything there is to see with vegetables along comes a trip to Peter Glazebrook's garden in Nottinghamshire. What an amazing evening I had with my local hort soc last night and what an incredible man Peter is.

Peter is mainly a giant veg grower these days although he does still grow a few for the quality classes. The pot leeks in a raised bed with glass sides were bigger than any I ever seen anywhere.....and I've been to some north-east pot leek shows in September. It's only early July for crying out loud!

Look further back beyond the leeks and you can see his long carrots growing against his barn at an angle in a wooden framework.

The giant swedes were stupendous, the beetroot bionic and the marrows mega.

Peter's garden is very large and he has several huge greenhouses, tunnels and other structures. I don't know how he manages to keep on top of everything and keeps everything growing so amazingly big and beautiful.

For the past few years he's been trying to smash the world's heaviest onion record coming agonisingly close on a couple of occasions. I don't want to tempt fate but I reckon we could be seeing something very special at Harrogate this year. I took a photo but knowing how Peter likes to keep his cards close to his chest I won't publish it on here. All I'll say is that one plant in particular had 37 leaves which is the most he's ever had. The circumference must have been close to 30".

As i'm competing at Harrogate this year against the Yorkshire Village People, namely messrs Unsworth and Bastow aka Quentin and Elton, I shall make sure I'm around for the big onion weigh off on the Friday morning.

Oh and thankyou to Peter's wife Mary for the best cup of tea i've had in ages and a lovely slice of cake.