All change

I was 3rd with long carrots at Derby (out of 3!), Dave T being 1st and 2nd, but to me this photo is significant for a number of reasons. Albeit these were literally the last 3 long carrots I had left to pull but all season I was getting lovely clean carrots, with nice shape and form but struggling to get any weight on them, and if i'm honest they've been going downhill for a few years as I've tweaked my mixes from one season to the next. It's all the more frustrating as I had the biggest, freshest, healthiest looking tops for many a year so I was really hopeful of pulling some decent long carrots this season, which is why it's quite significant seeing mine against Dave Thornton's on the show bench. I saw his carrots at his garden a number of times during the season and always came away quite smug as his foliage always seemed quite small and spindly compared to mine. However, in August just before the National Championships he showed me the shoulders of a couple of his carrots and they were very large, totally out of proportion to the tops in my opinion so I was quite confused once I started pulling my own. At Derby he even displayed one carrot in the tap root collection that was the biggest I have ever seen, i'm not joking when I say it must have been at least 6" diameter.

It's a similar situation i'm thinking to dahlias. I've had dahlias before that have huge tops but when you come to dig up the tuber in the autumn for storage there is barely a root worth saving. Perhaps i've simply overfed my carrots to the detriment of the root which of course is the important part as far as we're concerned. Or perhaps I'm expecting too much from an old mix that has served me well over the years at local level and indeed is still more than good enough to win most of my local shows, but if I want to take the next step up I need to rethink things. So I sought the advice of National Tap Root Champion Ian Simpson and he told me that he used Graeme Watson's mix which was 4 gallons of sieved Levington F2S and 3 ounces of calcified seaweed. I thought perhaps he must have clicked 'send' on the email before he'd finished typing the rest of the mix so I asked for confirmation and he replied that indeed is all he used for his carrots last season. He feels that there is enough nutrient in the F2S to last the season and overfeeding gives coarse skins. So what the hell, i'm going to try it next season and see if I start to get better results. It certainly makes things a lot simpler and should mean I'm able to get my holes bored and filled in record time if nothing else.