Gender agenda

Because i'm not doing as many shows this season i'm cutting right back on the varieties i'm growing, which has lead to some difficult choices. It's an easy decision to ditch things like pak choi (who the fuck eats that shit anyway?), spring onions, turnips, swedes, radish and kohl rabi. All these crops were on my list last season for Westminster and I failed to get a single dish of any of them on the table. They looked superb either two weeks before or two weeks after, but all the time they were taking up valuable plot space and needed tending, often to the detriment of more important crops. And they all ended up on the compost heap!




I want to have another crack at caulis so I've decided to ditch runner beans this year, and grow them in the land that is free'd up. I'm also cutting down on spud varieties. I really struggle to get a decent skin finish on white spuds after they've been in store for a month or two, so I'm only growing Kestrel and Amour which any imbecile should be able to grow well, even the northern ring pirates. I'll probably grow about 40 bags of each but before that I need to hack back a load of shrubs and reclaim some new land to grow them in which i'm not looking forward to one little bit. I really wish i'd got into vegetables sooner than I did, rather than planting every colourful, rampant shrub going as soon as we moved into our house in the early 90's.



I will always make sure that I leave room for a few broad bean plants, one of life's true delicacies. Broad beans are about the only veg I grow that I don't aim to show, and Leesa makes a mean bacon with broad bean in orange sauce dinner. I'm still in two minds whether to bother with marrows, a new class introduced for the first time at National level this year with the aim of getting new growers to have a crack. But instead of needing to find a pair they've ridiculously opted to make it a set of 3. Finding a good matching pair is hard enough, and the plants take up an awful lot of room so getting three is going to be amazingly difficult and takes it way out of the realms of a beginner's capabilities in my opinion.



As I want to ensure getting a dish of medium tomatoes at Harrogate(6) and Malvern(12) I need 'wall to wall' Cedrico in one 8'x6' greenhouse, although I won't be sowing these for another couple of weeks yet, possibly even the end of March. This gives me about a spare metre of run in a second greenhouse to grow some small fruited tomatoes (we don't call them cherry these days!) so I am going to be limited to just one variety this year, perhaps 6 plants crammed side-by-side in pots. And the choice couldn't be simpler, for me it has to be Sungold. A quick glance in Medwyn's/Shelley's etc catalogues and you will see varieties listed as the 'only one to grow' for the small fruited classes, such as Piccolo and Tastyno. I grew Harlequin last season after seeing Geoff Butterworth win with it at Westminster in 2010, and indeed I got a 3rd there in 2011 (below), but by Christ do the plants give you cause for concern. They grew in a real weird fashion, the leaves often twisting and corkscrewing, giving the appearance of being very sickly. But it didn't seem to affect fruiting and I picked hundreds of fruits from half a dozen plants, that were very tasty indeed. But Sungold still beats them for taste in my opinion and having come 2nd with it at Malvern, and Sungold beating my Harlequin to 2nd place at Westminster I'm gratified to see that judges aren't being 'snobby' about varieties that aren't normally in the tickets.

However, there is a proviso about staging Sungold, or indeed any tomato at a high level, and that is you need to hire yourself a woman. At 5am at Malvern on the Saturday morning I gave Leesa a bowl of Sungold that i'd hastily picked at midnight by torchlight and said 'plonk those on a board for me, they've got no chance but it's an entry'. When she showed me her effort 10 minutes later I couldn't believe how good they looked, she certainly has an eye for selecting a matching set of fruits, and I was rewarded with a 2nd of course. I very often ask her now to match up a lot of my veg, especially things like tomatoes and peppers, and she even selected my winning cylindrical beet for Westminster when I was adamant a different set was better. Medwyn once won the National with tomatoes on his wife Gwenda's selection so it does appear that ladies do have an eye for that sort of thing.