Survival

Well now, I've been suffering since Thursday from what I believe is quite simply the most severe case of manflu that has ever been recorded. Today my voice went and meant I was unable to take phone calls from customers. Bliss! Quite how i'm still alive however is a miracle and is testament to my amazing fitness and powers of recovery.....plus a wife who tolerates my pathetic whinings and runs around after me! Along with torrential rain it meant I was unable to do any gardening and I fear certain things may have got away from me as a result. I have one cucumber in the fridge at 17.25" having left it too long on the vine despite my intention not to do so. Due to my weakened state of health I only got around to cutting it on Sunday. The others are straining just over 16" but I doubt they'll catch up as the weather is so cold and miserable.


I've been cutting french beans at 7" since Sunday as I find they start to go beany much after that and I'd rather have a smaller set showing no bean bulge than hope for a longer set that I may never achieve. Quite how certain growers get beanless pods up to 9" is beyond me. Perhaps heated greenhouses? I mentioned this method before of storing beans on the incline with their stalks in a shallow pool of water. Kept in a darkened garage it does seem to keep them in good condition for several days meaning you can pick many beans to give you a lot from which to make your final choice. A word of warning....try and make your final choice at home before travelling when you are less stressed and only take a couple of spares. That way you can just lay them out with confidence at the show knowing they are your best set.

I am still very unsure how my long beet is going to turn out. The recent rains and high winds have absolutely battered the foliage so thank God all tap roots have to be displayed with 3" leaf stalks only. This is the scene that greeted me at lunchtime today.

I'm really looking forward to trying to get the long beets up. Of all the tap roots long beet are the ones most likely to snap and the few that I've grown in the past have often snapped at the 2' mark when I've pulled them a la parsnips and long carrots so I'm going to go to extra lengths to try and extract them complete from the bore holes. I have been advised to sink a bore pipe next to each root and take out a plug of the growing medium. Using a hose pipe I shall try carefully washing the soil from around the root and hopefully it will fall into the hole and come away intact the full depth of the drum. They're not huge shouldered but long beet only need to be about 3" diameter at most to look their best as long as they carry their weight down the root for the first foot or so. I've never exhibited a full dish of long beet before so this one is a totally new one for me if I manage it, which is a tad ambitious as I've only grown two drums of 7!

So at the moment I don't quite know which of my 15+ entries for Malvern will actually make the benches (if any!), but that is no matter because if the weekend is anything like last year's National at Llangollen we'll have a very enjoyable weekend with our NVS friends, swapping tips, ideas, not taking things too seriously and generally ripping the piss out of each other. On the NVS website's members only forum we are having a fruit cake competition and several growers and their wives/girlfriends/hangers-on going to Malvern are entering this most prestigious event of the weekend. Despite a certain amount of bureaucratic red tape that was originally thrown in our path (and which we have decided to ignore and indeed ridicule) the cake-off is still going ahead. There is also a class for a vegetable animal and I have a plan for an animal so lifelike it would fool Bill Oddie. To me this is what being a member of a Society is all about and whilst I would love a ticket of any description in the National Championship classes I am totally looking forward to meeting up with the friends we made last year and making new ones from the many, many people I speak to on the forum all year. One young chap who lives in Ireland is even going to enter next year's championships by sending me his spuds via the postal service to stage for him!

Several growers have used the forum to great effect to win prizes at Branch and National Championships by asking advice over the Winter months and then putting it into practice. I've said in the past that before the internet we would have to get by if any problems arose and then come show time you would be able to ask the winning growers how they achieved their success. Now we can talk to each other all year via the various online forums, emails and texts and quickly resolve any problems you come up against rather than having to wait until showtime. So if you want to improve your produce and you haven't already done so make sure you join the National Vegetable Society where growers are only too willing to help you out! However, one bit of advice i'm never divulging is my prize winning fruit cake method!