Eat to the beet

As I'm not showing until mid-September at the earliest I still haven't sown any gobe beet yet. In theory they take about 15 weeks from sowing to showing and I will now sow a row a week until the third week in June to cover all my shows. However I do find that current judges' favourite 'Pablo' can end up all sizes from the same sowing, some getting to grapefruit size in barely 7 or 8 weeks and others being marble sized in 20 weeks, so you do need to give yourself plenty of options.


My best shaped roots in recent years have undoubtedly come from my deep raised leek beds which have been cultivated for several years now to a fine, rich tilth meaning the central tap roots can get down very deep. It also stays quite thin all the way down, whereas if you grow in soil it can be a bit thick just below the bulb. I sow a 20' row either side of the leeks, (I find they compliment each other) although on one side where the shallots are still growing it won't be until mid-June at the earliest. Each row can potentially yield me 50 roots or more as I will sow them only 4" or so apart.

However, I also have several half drums filled with compost sievings and leftover carrot and parsnip mixes all mixed up together, and last year I grew some intermediate beet 'Forono' in these, culminating in me winning the class for a set of 4 intermediate beet at Westminster.

They do seem a lot harder to match up than globe beet, and indeed I had to rely on Leesa to make the final choice of 4 for this dish. She really does have a good eye (well, she married me!). I sowed a few drums of these on Tuesday evening including some in this old galvanised dustbin. When we went to wheelie bins most people chucked these out....i'm glad i'm a hoarder and kept ours!

Tonight I hope to get my long beet sown, perhaps a little late for any high expectations at the likes of Malvern and Westminster, but as I produced some absolute monsters from an early May sowing last season I thought I'd delay it a bit to compare quality. The best roots need to be about 3" diameter at the top, certainly no more than that otherwise they do seem to lose a bit of quality. The variety i'm growing this season is 'Regar', one i've always struggled with in the past as they do tend to twist quite easily. I'm told the key is to keep the mix moist at all times. My drums are a mix of sand and compost so that they are not as free draining as the parsnip and carrot drums. My bore hole mix this year is as follows;


1 gallon sieved topsoil (bagged)
1 gallon sieved multipurpose compost
1 gallon sieved coarse sand
2 oz Tev04
2 oz Calcified seaweed
2 oz Seaweed meal
+and a sprinkling of table salt!

Here is last year's winning set from the Llangollen National grown by John Jones. Nice!

On Tuesday evening I also thinned down my Sweet Candle stumps to one per station. By angling the seedlings you don't want to keep at about 45 degrees and pulling gently they come out without too much disturbance. I try and leave behind seedlings that are all at approximately the same stage of development, which sometimes means pulling out the largest and best looking ones.

After thinning I gave a sprinkling of phorate powder to kill any carrot fly that may somehow manage to get through my mesh and polythene framework. I have this bed with 24 roots in......

....and this one with 44 roots in (yes I know I need to do some weeding!!!).

All I need to do now is water them once or twice a week and hopefully I'll have some decent stumps to show come the middle of September onwards. Trouble is I'll not know this until the day before the show when they might all come out fanged and all the effort will have been in vain, such are the pitfalls of this silly hobby.

For the past couple of seasons I've had a wager with NVS National Secretary Dave Thornton based on accumulated performances at several shows, but this year the wager is all down to one class, the so called Millennium Class at Malvern which calls for 5 dishes of 4, namely 250g onions, stump carrots, tomatoes, globe beet and spuds. The one with the highest points value on the judge's scorecards will win the 20 quid and I'm reasonably confident this time around that I can beat him, especially as we have both agreed that the money has got to be handed over during the evening in the hotel in front of everyone else, whilst grovelling before the victor on bended knee. I don't intend to be that twat, so I really need my globe beet and stumps to be good again this season. This was last year's winner at Llangollen, staged by my NVS chum Mark Hall who will be going for a hat-trick of wins this year.

I believe I also have a small wager with Marcus Powell on the outcome of this class so I will either be raking it in or emptying out my pockets on the morning of 29th September.

This was my unplaced set in a similar class at Malvern last year where you only need to get 4 dishes from the choice of 5. If I'd been able to stage a set of tomatoes (18 pointers) instead of having to go with two sets of 15 pointers (globe beet and 250g onions) I could have won this class as the scoring was very, very close.

I got an unexpected bonus this week when it was pointed out to me that we get TWO bank holidays, Monday & Tuesday next week. I didn't know and no fucker at work told me and i'm supposed to be a director! I couldn't direct a fucking bus! Leesa was actually going to let me get up and go to work on Tuesday to a deserted factory to see how long it was before I realised. How vindictive can you get? It means I will have an extra day's gardening so I want to make hay and get all the nagging little jobs out of the way so that I can get on with final planting over the next couple of weeks. However, a word of warning my friends......make sure you're safe at all times in the garden over the long weekend and whatever you do, DON'T have any accidents. When those out-of-touch bastard doctors go on strike you'll most likely be left to bleed to death!

Sunday visit to church

I love my veg, but I refuse to be tied down to it. Recently I've been itching to get out walking so despite the 27 degree temperatures I took Leesa out for a leisurely 10 mile hike yesterday. She'd heard me enthusing about the 'Roaches' in Staffordshire and decided she'd like to come and see what all the fuss was about, so I left the veg to fend for itself in the heat, packed the rucksack, donned a ridiculous pair of shorts, laced up the boots and off we went. Leesa likes to walk light.....

...so guess which turnip had to lug the heavy rucksack as usual?

First stop was a 200' long chasm 50' deep in the wooded hillside called 'Lud's Church'. It was much cooler down here and as you can see from the ferns and mosses clinging to the side, sunlight doesn't penetrate much.

I made a new friend along the way!

After some gentle uphill plodding we reached the top at approx. 1660 feet. A young lady kindly took our photo. Always offer to return the favour.....then run off like billyo with their camera!

At the end of the day a deserved pint of Abbot's Ale....

....and half a shandy!

Back on the plot things didn't suffer too much in the heat but I am having to give the onions quite a lot of water to keep them ticking along. I should shade them or lug them outside but to be honest I just can't be bothered, and they seem to be doing very well despite the heat. There's a class in the NVS National Championships for onions over 1kg but smaller than 1.5kg (3.3lbs)so I will try and get a set of 5 for that for a giggle, although they're easily the best i've ever had at this stage of the season and we still haven't reached the longest day yet so who knows what size they'll end up.

I did manage to get the leeks collared on Saturday. This year i'm using these plastic coated twist wires that you cut to your desired length (Dave Thornton gave me a huge bundle of it) and they make the task of collaring and uncollaring the plants on a regular basis much easier than fiddling about with bits of string as i've done previously.

I got all the shallots 'dished', that is the soil removed from around the clump so that each bulb can swell out without any chance of stones or hard lumps halting their progress. I'm still watering them at the moment but will stop this in the next few days with a view to starting to get them ripened off by mid-June. They're all roughly 33mm diameter in the main at the moment. As soon as these are lifted I'll sow some globe beet in their place which should be about right for Malvern or Westminster.

As well as 15 bags of Kestrel (just popping through) I got 10 bags of Amour set out. I was going to do 20 of each but I may well leave it at that now.

My celery plants have continued to grow well and I'll be planting them out over the coming Jubilee weekend. I am having to make sure the pots are thoroughly wet at all times and having the plants in these blue trays means I can pour an inch or more of water to achieve this, celery being bog plants in the wild that don't much care for wilting sunshine.

The long carrots in pipes in the greenhouse are another crop that are suffering in the heatwave, and I think I may have to abandon this idea as an alternative way of growing long roots in future. A few that were growing away ok have just been cooked to a crisp! Getting enough water to them is proving to be problematic, and I think i'm probably only wetting the top few inches but I'm also worried about flooding them. Back to the drawing board.

However, mad mexicans seem to be enjoying this sunshine......

....and the herbs also love it, being mainly of Mediterranean origin. Funnily enough I thought I heard the ghostly voice of Robin Gibb emanating from my herb bed earlier but when I went to investigate it was just the chive talking.

I'm not small, i'm just concentrated!

I've had a difficult few days. I got stopped and questioned by the police for having images of child pornography on my i-phone. I said to the policeman "you fucking cheeky twat, those are pictures of my own cock!"


Last Saturday I planted my Cedrico tomatoes, 15 plants in all, a little earlier than I would ideally have liked but as the night-time temperatures are forecast good for the next week I had to risk it as they were getting a little too tall to stay in the pots much longer. I think once they get their feet into the border soil they are able to withstand a few low-ish temperatures a bit better so by the end of the month all should be well.

I do take a bit of time with the preparation. At first I dig a trench a 'spit' deep all round the edge of the greenhouse border. Every 2nd year I'll line the bottom with well-rotted horse muck but I did that last year so I just watered well and dusted the bottom with Q4 and Nutrimate powder. This also allows me to see what the soil structure is like and whether it is reasonably moist, which would not have been the case had I not been flooding the soil during the Winter with buckets of water. If you don't do this regularly through Winter then nutrients (or 'salts') can get locked up in the soil, especially potash which can become quite harmful apparently. As it was I was pleased the soil looked in very good heart. (Bear in mind that I am prepared to completely change the soil every 5 or 6 years if necessary).

The soil is replaced into the trench but as I do that I put the bottomless pots in the positions where I intend to grow each plant, pushing the soil around them to secure them in position, so that they are buried with the rims almost level with the finished soil surface.

A cane is put in each pot and secured to a wire with a spring clip (available from Medwyns) at about 4' height just before the roof slope. This gives me a really secure set-up that won't fall over under the weight of the plants, and is easily done in a few minutes, certainly a lot less messing than bits of string.

At this point I also place the watering pots in between each plant, which are also bottomless 'rose pots' and therefore quite deep. I will water into these once the plants are well established with the roots well down. This concentrates the water right at the roots and allows you to keep the border soil surface bone dry (not dust dry!). This is important as tommies love a hot, dry atmosphere and it also discourages the various rots than can afflict your crop. You really want to avoid splashing water around anywhere near tomatoes.

I plant them deep into good quality compost, past the bottom couple of leaves (which are removed) and water well. New 'feeder' roots will emerge along the buried stem to make them even stronger plants. The plants will not now be watered until they are almost begging me to, as I want the roots to go down into the border soil. I prefer this method over pots on grobags as I believe it does buy you some time in the middle of Summer on hot days if you cannot get to water them for whatever reason. Miss a watering when in grobags and you are storing up trouble and risking blossom-end rot, but because my plants' roots will be way down in moist soil I'll get away with missing a day or two....especially important when we go on holiday at the end of August and I'll be relying once again on my scatty daughters! This photo was taken today in 27degree temperatures and they do appear to be wilting but it's a reflex reaction and they tend to recover by the cool of evening. If they haven't then I will give them a drink.

I will be tying the plants to the canes every 6 or 8" with some pieces of velcro strip this season, something I also bought off Medwyn. It comes on a roll and there should be more than enough and again seems a lot easier than messing about with bits of string. They can also be re-used for years. I will be taking the plants as far as they can go up into the roof ridge of the greenhouse. You don't actually get many showable fruits above the 6th truss without heat during the back-end of the year, but I have a theory that the extra fruit helps balance the plants out and stops the lower ones getting too big.


I really want to get a set of 12 tomatoes at the Malvern National Championships this year having lost my first batch to a cold chill last season when they were planted in early May in order to try and time them for Llangollen at the end of August. Medwyn himself won it and having beaten him at Malvern in 2010 I'm reasonably hopeful (he's never beaten me you see!) it's the one crop I might have a chance of getting a ticket at National level. The experience of previous years tells me the majority of my fruits will start coming good during mid-September and as Cedrico is what is called a 'vine-ripe' variety they do last on the plants for several weeks in good condition. However, there is an awful lot of work to do to these small plants before then and I certainly won't be getting complacent this time around.

There are various ways of staging tomatoes and at National level they provide you with a board so that everyone is on the same playing field, and no-one can deviate from that by using other aids such as cloths. At village and town level paper plates are the norm but if the schedule allows (i.e. it doesn't say you can't!) try and incorporate aids to help your tomatoes stand out from the rest. Curtain rings under a piece of black cloth work well, or some dry play sand or vermiculite on the plate. In fact anything that will stop your tomatoes rolling about on the bench, for instance when stewards have to move them to make room for other exhibits. The judge should always endeavour to leave them in the state he found them, but if they need a bit of effort to stop them lolling around he aint gonna bother!

This weekend I'll be attempting to get a few stations of long beet sown, plant my bags of 'Amour' potatoes, and collar up the blanch leeks that I planted out last weekend, although if the weather stays as 'scorchio' as it currently is I may well be tempted instead to pour a few bevvies, put my feet up and watch the weeds grow! Talking of weeds, I've just remembered another way of staging tomatoes, although not one i've yet tried myself, which is back on your kitchen table 100 miles away .....a la Dave Thornton.

Onion stew

I've had my first real set-back of the year, one of my Red Baron onions (grown from sets) in the raised wooden bed going to seed. I do find this variety is rather prone to bolting and I've pulled the offending plant up so as not to encourage any others to do the same, although I don't doubt it will be the last. The recent drops in temperature have no doubt caused this but hopefully I'll still be able to harvest a fair few specimens.

I'm sure before the season is out there'll be other problems to contend with and like other seasons some crops will flourish and others will disappoint. Very often it's a crop that you thought you had nailed and have taken your eye off the ball with. No two seasons are the same which is a good thing as you'd give up growing some vegetables otherwise! Thrips used to be the bane of my greenhouse onion crops, the tiny little insects devouring the newly emerging shoots right in the growing point of the plant. When the leaves grew bigger the tiny little nibbles looked like thousands of larger nibbles that seriously weakened your plant and affected the ultimate size of the bulb therefore. Thanks to regular squirtings of Dynamec i'm pleased to report I seem to have this particular pest under control. But you have to make sure you do spray it right into the centre of the plants where the brighter coloured new leaves are emerging, gently holding them apart slightly to make sure the chemical gets in between them. If you spray over the outer leaves in general it will have no effect whatsoever, and will be akin to asking Diarmuid Gavin to talk sense about gardening.

I've also been asked about the following problem with onions, whereby roots grow upwards between the layers of bulb tissue, causing bulging and rendering them useless for showing, although you can strip some outer layers until you get to the offending root if it's not too far in. Dave Thornton reckons it's down to the growing media being too compacted as he says that a plant's roots are 'positively geotrophic', whatever that means as the university educated cunt does like to show off to me with a few long words now and again. Another theory i've been offered is that the plants might have been given too much feed that throws them out of kilter somewhat. Any other ideas are gratefully received, although I have to say it's not a common problem by all accounts and my onions still appear to be growing magnificently well, although I am shading them during the day whilst we have this mini-heatwave.

So let the problems keep coming but above all stay positive, enjoy your gardening, learn from any setbacks and put them in the memory bank for next season. And be careful when walking about the plot at dusk, especially if you've had a drink. I've cut back on my alcohol consumption this year so that I have a clear head at all times, having walked over a couple of trays of onions last season that i'd put outside for hardening off. To be fair I was absolutely wankered so I got off lightly with just that!

Gavin a floral ball!

Whilst i'm clearing large swathes of my garden to grow more veg in future years I couldn't imagine not having a good selection of flowers about the place. I always find May/June the best months as the colours seem deeper and crisper. This is a selection of some flowering plants in my garden at this very moment.

And for the benefit of one person who had a go at me recently, i'm am most certainly NOT anti-Irish (especially the ones with semtex and an itchy trigger finger)....just anti that arsehole!

Rest assured I haven't gone homo....Veg stuff will be returning shortly!

RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2012

Every lunchtime I go home to see if anything needs watering in the greenhouses, then sit back and catch half an hour of Bargain Hunt. It's something of a ritual and sets me up for the afternoon. So I was most upset today to tune in instead to the BBC's annual coverage of the complete load of bollocks that is the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. 10 minutes was enough to show me that the RHS Floral Pavillion still doesn't get enough coverage and that the show garden designers are still a bunch of pretentious out-of-touch knob-jockeys who haven't seen a fucking greenfly in years.

Alan Titchmarsh, Nikki Chapman et al still use the same buzzword which is 'innovative'. To those of us blessed with the gifts of sight and common sense this roughly translates as 'wank'. And the reigning Chief Wanker once again this year is the little Irish fucktwat Diarmuid Gavin, whose tower garden is about as practical as a cheese dildo. When will the RHS stop giving these lunatics a platform and start showing some proper, down-to-Earth garden design with appropriate emphasis on the plants rather than the ridiculous monstrosities that go under the guise of 'show gardens'?

Parsnip aftercare

I'm very happy with my parsnip progress this season and will be spending more time coddling them than the past two seasons.

All stations were primed with pre-chitted seeds that had the root radicle just visible through the seed casing. This does need to be done very carefully so as not to damage the delicate root. I bury them no more than 1/2" deep into moist compost and water them in with a sprayer.

The 3" tube sections will stay around the plants to concentrate water throughout the season. A pane of glass on top of these kept a moist atmosphere until germination when I inclined them against the tubes. This was so that they didn't scorch if we had any sun (fat chance!) but also to stop them getting the worst of any strong prevailing winds. As the next werk or so forecast decent temperatures I have now removed the glass panes completely. These seedlings will really start to take off in the next few weeks.

Back to reality!

We had a wonderful break in Tenerife, our first holiday in 26 years without kids! I can highly recommend it! It was however a huge culture shock when you've been used to Greek islands for many years. The Spaniards actually finish building things! Pavements didn't suddenly end in a huge pothole. Everything was neat and tidy. The roads put ours to shame. However, Spanish cooking isn't a patch on Greek cuisine although we ate well enough. I'd never had paella before....and I won't in future. What a disappointment that was! And the Spanish cannot cook fish to save their lives. But we'll definitely be going again.

It was a real culture shock flying into a very windy Manchester Airport last Sunday evening. Not only did I very nearly shit my pants during an extremely turbulent landing but the change in weather from Tenerife made me fear for any progress on the plot. I needn't have worried. My tomatoes in particular have grown off the scale, to the point I probably need to get them planted this weekend rather than at the end of the month. I've never had such strong plants as these before and the roots have already gone right out of the bottoms of the 4" pots.

Elsewhere, my shallots are also looking good, with strong, thick tops that are bigger than I've ever known at this stage of the season. I wonder if the deeper planting has had anything to do with this? I really am hopeful of getting some good bulbs this season and will be spraying with Rovral towards the end of the month to avoid the usual yearly botrytis losses in storage.

All of my stump rooted carrots Sweet Candle are through and will need thinning in a couple of weeks or so. The long carrots are also through but a little on the small side for now, as are the pre-chitted parsnips.

I've had several folk saying to me something along the lines of 'my roots are just sitting there and not growing' and getting quite worried about the fact. Whilst it has been quite cold on occasion recently I do think there is nothing to really worry about, and things will be happening below the surface that you cannot see, so as long as the seedlings look healthy then don't panic. I find that parsnips especially will suddenly take off in June. There's a long way for most of us until show-time. Before I went away I made sure I scattered a few slug pellets on the drum and sand bed surfaces, as snails in particular will happily scrape themselves across a gritty surface for a few carrot seedlings. The snotty trails and empty shells lying around on my return have indicated I was right to do so, especially as I have lost a few onion sets planted outside to the little buggers. It just goes to show that when food is scarce on a cleared plot they will eat anything if they have to, even plants that you wouldn't normally associate with slugs and snails.


Before the holiday I visited Dave Thornton's plot in Derby as he had a few 'goodies' for me that I won't mention by name on here for fear of upsetting those of you who actually want to eat the veg you grow! He gave us a quick tour of his plot and it was reassuring to note that his long carrots and parsnips had only just popped through in many cases. We can all learn from each other, no matter how experienced we are, and when he mentioned that one of his parsnip stations had drawn a blank despite being primed with a chitted seed I said "why don't you place two chitted seeds like I do?" He never said anything but the look on his face told a story along the lines of 'now why didn't I think of that you smug Loughborough bastard!'


One of the things Dave supplied me was an industrial sized bag of seaweed meal which I have been using to top dress where a lot of my leafy crops will be growing.....cabbages, celery, beetroot and leeks. I also chucked a handful in the bottom of each of my spud bags. I'm very scientific as you can see! I managed to get 15 bags of Kestrel done before I went away, leaving them on the floor in my garage, and as yet no shoots have emerged.

These will be put in trenches outside this weekend. The chitted shoots on the Kestrel were 1/2" or so long and therefore ready for planting, but the Amour are still quite small so I'll be leaving those until next weekend. I'm only going to bother with 20 bags of each, as I only need a few dishes this season and I won't be bothering growing any whites at all.

Actually, that last statement isn't strictly true as I am growing some Maris Piper at the request of my wife. These were planted in the ground purely for kitchen use and as a way of breaking up the newly dug ground that i've recently cleared of trees and shrubs.

They'll no doubt have a few slug holes and scab marks but will be perfectly fine for eating, but as I haven't grown spuds in soil for 10+ years it'll mean reacquainting myself with the method of earthing up. I well remember my first forays into showing veg, when I proudly placed my scabby earth grown spuds in a class where there were several plates of spuds that were gleaming in comparison. The concept of growing in bags or pots filled with peat was in its infancy and it took several years for me to work out why I could never get the skin finish on mine, mainly because no-one was forthcoming with the method when I asked them. Thankfully, this need no longer be the case if you join the National Vegetable Society where problems are aired in the online forum and solutions are usually forthcoming within a few hours. There is now a nationwide network of members who are all only too willing to share their growing methods and ideas, all for the measly sum of 19 quid a year!


This is a diagram of how I grow the spuds in bags in the ground...

This weekend as well as planting my tomatoes, I'll also have to get my blanch leeks in which are straining to get out of their pots.

My onions need tidying up and i've started putting bigger ring supports around them to support the leaves. I've made them from some aluminium welding rods that can easily be formed into hoops.

That's pretty much it for now. I'm happy with the way things are progressing and looking forward to entering my 2nd National in September and catching up with friends and 'foes'. As a final thought, John Branham has been our top showman for many years, winning the National Collection class on many occasions. In the individual classes I believe he has won virtually every one at some point or other, but at Llangollen last season he didn't win anything, some new faces coming to the fore for once. But John is still the best and he will be back this season at Malvern I have absolutely no doubt. Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool and Leeds United fans might do well to remember it takes more than one lucky season to achieve true greatness! Manchester United have shown true dignity in congratulating their City counterparts and I shall be showing the same restraint, decorum and etiquette. Now fuck off and stop texting and emailing me you Yorkshire bastards because you're annoying me now!