Tapping into the past

Many, many moons ago, back when Manchester Utd had only just started to put Liverscum back in their box, a journey which was fully completed last Wednesday night when King Jose put another big dollop of gleaming silverware in the Old Trafford trophy room, before even Tony Bliar and Gordon Brown had knackered the British economy up for several generations to come,  I watched an episode of Gardener’s World where Medwyn Williams was pulling his long carrots and parsnips for the very grandly named British Tap Root Championships. It was in fact so long ago that Medwyn fitted on screen without them having to go to a wide camera lens. When I got into showing veg a few years later I remembered that programme and vowed to enter the British Tap Root Championships as soon as possible. However, it’s something I’ve never managed to do, as it’s always held as part of the Welsh Branch Championships of the NVS and it has invariably clashed with one of my other shows.

So with my final year of showing in mind I felt I’d better bite the bullet and finally give it a go this season and get it out of my system. For this class you have to stage 2 parsnips, 2 long carrots, 2 long beetroot and 2 stump rooted carrots. The very best root growers in the country, (and Mark Perry), have all won this class in the past. Whilst I’m confident of growing decent parsnips and long carrots for this class, benching the other 2 crops to a decent standard will take a bit more doing. For the past few years my stump carrots have been troubled with a disease called cavity spot (Pythium violae) and they’ve been pretty average as a result I have to say. This problem manifests itself as sunken dark spots on the skins that won’t rub off no matter what, making them look quite ugly when they dry out. The only way of combatting this was to buy in fresh sand for the beds, so I emptied them out and set up more drums for long carrots with the surplus sand. It’s weird, but long carrots don’t seem to suffer from cavity spot for some reason. Parsnips are also said to be susceptible but again it’s not a problem I’ve encountered either. Having set up the new beds (mine are old paving slabs set on edge to contain the sand) and allowed the sand time to settle when the time came to do the bore holes I was seriously lacking motivation having done 94 bore holes for long roots the previous couple of weekends. In the past I’ve cored a hole out of the sand then finished off to two foot depth with a crowbar. In truth I just couldn’t be arsed, so after coring out 115 holes with a 2 ½ ” diameter plastic tube to 12” deep, spitting the surplus sand into a bucket, I just filled the holes with a 4:1 sieved M2/vermiculite mix (no added nutrients) through a metal funnel that had the whole task done in a few hours. It was a pleasant change. My idea is that the root will use up the nutrients in the 12” core, develop a definite stump end rather than growing down forever as it hits the nutrient free sand, the tap root itself will happily go down into the sand for moisture. We shall see. I sowed all my Sweet Candle seeds at the start of April and got great germination, and now have two very even beds growing away really well. It’s important not to let Sweet Candle dry out as the roots can easily grow overlong and become rough skinned so the sprinkler will be getting some use over the Summer.

In the past any long beet I’ve ever grown have tended to be grown in boreholes where the parsnips or long carrots have failed to germinate. Very often I’ve ended up with huge long beet that don’t quite cut the mustard for quality. For the British Tap Champs I decided I had to be a bit more dedicated and so I set up a row of plastic drainpipe tubes I grew some long carrots in a few years back. I filled each of these with about 18litres of an M2/peat/silver sand mix with added seaweed meal which I’m hoping will give good colour. A long beet expert once told me that long beet need much more water than other long roots so I really need to make sure these pipes don’t dry out. Positioned on the shady side of my tunnel the worst of the sun keeps off them during the hottest part of the day so that should help.

It will be nice to do well in this class if I can. At the RHS Westminster Autumn Show held at the beginning of October I managed to win a similar class there in 2015 after several years of trying. I scored well with my long carrots and parsnips, my stumps were not too bad on this occasion, but my long beet only were a bit heavy and had poor form so only scored 12.5. Good enough to win on the day against Jim Pearson and David Thornton but I’ll need to improve if I’m to be in the tickets at Wales in September.