T minus 2

It never ceases to amaze me how the Yorkshire Uphill Claydiggers continue to poke cheap jibes at my apparent lack of vertical inches. No matter, for come Friday morning I have no doubt that I will be higher than Adolf Hitler's gas bill as I celebrate my win in the Bullshit Bloggers' Challenge ......or BBC as Unsworth and Bastow now insist on calling it as it means they have to type less words the lazy northern shitstabbers. Along with my magnificent certificate Dan has donated these rather spiffing shiny medals to allocate between us so he must have found some money in one of his clay pots. I guess we just need Mr Bastow to donate something now? I don't mind taking home the black pudding but he can keep the whippet!

Tonight, to save a bit of time tomorrow night, I shall be pulling my carrots and parsnips, matching them up into sets then covering them in the old potato bag peat. I won't wash them until tomorrow night however. I recently staged a set of carrots I had pulled over 8 days before and stored them this way very successfully with no apparent deterioration in skin finish, so one day aint gonna matter one jot. Therefore a carrot and a parsnip will be making up veg 2 and 3 of my set with a 'stick' of celery, plus I have a Sherine spud in storage that will be washed tomorrow night. That makes 4. A blanch leek equals 5 so I just need to decide on my 6th which will come from either a runner bean or a tomato as I finally have some ripe ones. I predict that I will score between 75 and 80 out of 120! There's nowt so bracing as sticking your neck out and watching your head get cut off!



The Northern Horticultural Society side of the show have a class called (rather grandly) the National Carrot Championship which requires a set of 3 long carrots and a set of 3 stump rooted carrots. I have entered this also. No doubt Graham Watson and Peter Clark will also be entering this class so it will be a fine opportunity to compare my roots against the very best in the land and see how far I still need to progress. Welsh Branch run something called the National Tap Root Championships where you have to stage long carrots, parsnips, long beet and stump carrots and I've always wanted to enter that one day. Calling myself National Carrot Chumpion will do for now though!