Montello peccadillo

The showman’s Spring is one long list of back-breaking or time consuming tasks that have to be done by certain dates to ensure you’re in the tickets come August/September/October. In January we’re emptying our root drums of sand and putting it all back in again! This adds air to the sand and stops it getting too compacted over time, thus making the process of boring or coring your holes less difficult. For the past few years I haven’t bothered to empty out the whole depth of sand, just the top 18”-24” or so, this being entirely down to laziness, and it hasn’t had any detrimental effect so far, so in my opinion it’s your choice whether you bother. Purists will say it’s essential, but in my experience it has been anything but.

Then in February/March we’re actually boring the holes and filling with the mixes which is hard work believe me. This year I’ve done 44 parsnips and 50 long carrots. The parsnips were first in mid-March, and as I added extra height to the drums the process of coring and boring was harder. I now have a 7 foot long metal crowbar, 1 inch thick which takes some bastard lifting in and out of the 6 foot deep holes and twirling it around to make the bore holes 94 times I don’t mind admitting. I was using muscles I’d long since forgotten about. As I have to go ‘up’ to get long roots rather than digging down as some growers do on free draining plots meaning they can work from ground level, I soon realised I would have to make higher platforms on which to stand for the hole making process, as well as giving me somewhere to stand when I’m tending and watering the plants. It was something I hadn’t really reckoned on and lost me a whole weekend as I frantically threw together a series of wooden planks and offcuts. It’s an extremely unstable looking structure and shakes like a shitting dog but it only needs to last a season, although I have already fallen from it whilst stepping down onto a ‘step’ which consisted of nothing more than two stacked milk crates that gave way and turned out to be quite a painful experience on several parts of my body. You wouldn’t think I had a health & safety qualification would you?

Having suffered with cavity spot on my stumps for the past 3 years there was no alternative but to buy in fresh sand for the beds. This needed barrowing 200’ from the front of my house where it was delivered, quite precariously down a set of steps, along a narrow path and tipped into the emptied slab beds. Bollocksed dot com.

Next up are the exhibition onions. As my soil suffers with white rot I have to grow them in large pots (I actually have a bottomless one stacked on top of another), so I have to mix M3, vermiculite and sterilised soil several times to fill each pot. This year it involved a weekend huddled over a large mixing tub mixing everything, before filling the pots, planting the onions from their 4” pots and assembling a ‘cage’ of canes and metal rings to keep the bulb upright.

The next big job was the long beetroot. Having only dabbled with this crop in the past, chucking a few seeds into stations where parsnips or long carrots had failed to germinate I decided I would have to be a bit more serious if I wanted to have a decent crack at the British Tap Root Championships. With this in mind I had 23 six inch diameter plastic drainpipes about 3 foot long which I set up in a row next to my polytunnel. The problem with drainpipes is they take a lot more mix to fill them so several evenings were spent in my garage bent over the same mixing tub doing the mix for the long beet, about 18 litres per tube, transporting this up the garden to fill each pipe individually.

Then we move on to the spuds which we exhibitors grow in large plastic bags filled with peat to ensure we get nice clean tubers 12-14 weeks after planting. The peat, for me five 200 litres bales, has to be sifted or checked by hand to make sure there are no big lumps or sharp twigs that might stop the tubers from achieving a nice shape, before filling each bag with about 20 litres and adding fertiliser as we go. Again, two weekends bent over a tub, then filling 40 bags and placing a seed potato in each.

So it was with some relief that last weekend I finished what I consider to be the last ‘big job’, and in truth, the one I enjoy most, that of planting the tomatoes into their final positions in the greenhouse border. The sun was out, the compost was warm and the plants were all first rate as I set them out into their final positions around the greenhouse into large bottomless pots. The pots in front of the plants are also bottomless, and these will be used for watering later in the season so that it goes direct to the roots, and allows the soil surface to be dry, ideal conditions for tomatoes that like it hot but dry and prevents botrytis rots and other diseases caused by too much moisture.

Some people may think this is a bit late for planting out tomatoes but end of May has always been the date for me, and even then I’m keeping an eye on the night time weather forecasts for a week or so. 20 years ago we had a severe ground frost here in the East Midlands and we lost all sorts of crops. I remember the date vividly therefore. The tomatoes would probably survive an outside frost but it would knock them back.

From now on it’s really just a case of keeping every crop ticking along although there are still many crops to either sow and plant, but that’s a piece of piss if you call yourself a gardener. I now grow a variety of tomato called Zenith after my previous banker Cedrico got discontinued. Having won at Malvern in 2010 with Cedrico I suffered a barren-ish few years with toms, only winning the odd class locally although I did gain a nice 1^st at Westminster in 2012.

In 2015 I took a set of Cedrico up to the National at Dundee that quite frankly I was ashamed of. The calyces were turning yellow and when I came to set them out on the Friday morning I almost didn’t bother when I saw the quality of all the others benched. To say I was astonished to come back and find a 4^th place ticket against my set was an understatement. I suppose my fruits were a nice evenly matched set if nothing else so that must have counted in my favour. There were only about 10 entries and it just goes to show you but I still wonder to this day if the judge was pissed.

I was unable to make the National when it was held in Wales last season but sent a set of tomatoes down with a fellow grower who kindly agreed to take them and stage them for me. This time I was growing Zenith for the first time and I was really happy with the set, seen below on my kitchen table before travelling down.

In my eyes it was head and shoulders above the ones I’d come 4^th with the year before. However, I was only placed 5^th and when I found out in a text from Mark Perry I was fairly disappointed but apparently it was one of the best quality tomato classes in many a long year with over 30 entries so I had to be chuffed with that.

As September progressed I had some really nice fruits developing so that I was hopeful of doing well in the Midland Championships at Malvern. I was also growing a small fruited plum variety called Montello as Marshall Seeds were putting up £500 of prize money at Malvern for a special one-off class specifically for this variety, £250 to the winner so it was sure to attract a lot of interest. Contrary to Marshalls advice I sowed my Montello a bit later than they recommended and it looked as if I was to be proven right, as my plants were laden with hundreds of fruits come the end of September. It was an awful plant to manage, try as I might to keep it contained and grow it like a ‘normal’ tomato by nipping out any sideshoots. It just wouldn’t play ball and grew how it bloody well wanted whether you liked it or not, but the fruits were tasty enough and as I said, probably the most prolific tomato I’ve ever grown.

So, there I am on the eve of Malvern pulling my parsnips, in a happy mood as some nice roots were coming out. All of a sudden I heard a loud bang which sounded as if something had fallen heavily next door so I had a quick peer over the garden fence and couldn’t see anyone or anything so I had a wander back up my garden as I was intrigued at what I’d heard. I soon saw the cause of the commotion. The support wires holding the tomato canes in one of my greenhouses had snapped and yes you guessed it, all of my precious tomato plants including the Montello were now in a huge mangled heap on the floor. Furthermore most of my biggest and best Zenith had fallen from the calyces and were rolling around in the dirt in varying states of damage. It was utter carnage and I still hadn’t picked my sets for Malvern. An hour later, after tiptoeing through the mess and picking up what fruits I could salvage I had hundreds of fruits laid out on a raised bed and I had to laboriously pick out all the unblemished ones to make out my various sets. I did my best but my wife usually chooses my best fruits as she has a better eye than me but seeing as I was now so behind schedule I just boxed them up ready for loading.

Fast forward to 3.30am next morning and we’re offloaded at Malvern getting all the various entries in, when I came across my 15 Montello in the Tupperware box and went off to place them on the boards supplied. About 5.30 we’d finished and we had a quick wander round all the entries to make sure we hadn’t missed anything. When we got to the Montello class I told my wife about the prize money and from the 40-odd entries it was obviously going to be an extremely difficult class to judge. Most of the entries were covered over but my wife pointed to one set and said how nice they looked compared to all the others that you could actually see. She didn’t realise they were mine until I told her, so I was quite pleased bearing in mind her previous success in choosing my sets and thought I might even get close to a ticket.

I came 4th in the tomato class which was a disappointment as I believe that I could have won it had I not lost so many good fruits to damage the day before, but hey ho, it’s all put down to experience and I’ve made sure I’ve doubled up on the support wires this season, using stronger galvanised wire for the task.

I had completely forgotten about the Montello class believe it or not, that is until NVS Mids Chairwoman Sandra Hall came and guided me by the arm to the class in question to see ‘1st’ written on the back of my entry card. Later in the morning I was interviewed by a very nice woman from Marshalls, met one of their top brass and the actual breeder of the variety, which was interesting. I even appeared on their Twitter and Facebook feeds. Best of all was being presented with a big fat cheque for 250 quid for staging 15 little tomatoes. Mental! 

One final story, it was even later that I found out that Medwyn had judged the class and unsurprisingly it took him and his son Alwyn an hour and a half. After completing his deliberations he said right let’s find out who won, so he turned over the entry card with your name on and which is always left face down against your entry at Malvern and other big shows. I’m reliably informed that his exact words were “Oh fucking hell!” Charming!