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.