Raining champion

It's been a miserable day in more ways than one. I tried to pull some roots today in the pouring rain with a view to entering them at Westminster in the taproot class. However, my stumps and long beet were a long way off being good enough so I've left my long carrots and parsnips alone in the hope I'll have a decent set for Derby at the end of the month. I shall still travel to Westminster more as a fact finding mission fornext year but I did manage to cut some more decent tomatoes and along with my shallots I know these should be able to compete.

Yesterday was the 123rd Sturton Show and for the seventh time I won most points in show mainly because I picked up a few bonus points with some cacti and succulents. Most points in veg went to Ian Justice who put in some excellent leeks and long roots. This show was graced by Les Stothard who won the same trophy an amazing 22 times so I have some way to go to be mentioned in the same breath. He now concentrates on breeding dahlias with the prefix 'Blyton' and looks healthy enough to give the veg men a run for their money still.

I managed a 1-2-3 with the 3 sets of tomatoes that I showed at Malvern last week, although my NVS Midland Championship winners only came 2nd to the set that won me the novice class.
















I also got a clean sweep with shallots and one old sage tapped me on the shoulder and said they were the best he'd seen anywhere this season. He obviously hasn't seen Mr. Thornton's. I now need to select my best 12 to take down to Westminster.

And at long last I've managed a red card with celery. I accidentally found a way of cleaning these up without breaking any stalks as I was trying to wash the base over the bath. One fell out of my arms into the bath and of course the water supports everything. I was able to gently turn the plant round and round, cleaning up and down the stalks and teasing out any bits of dirt from between them without fear of breaking them off. I want to try and grow celery to a much better standard next season.

Show no.9 please

Another show tomorrow at Sturton in Lincolnshire, my 9th of the season. As i've said before this is a small village with a big show and any ticket here is earned. Indeed over the years I've had many more 2nds and 3rds than wins. I think it's the last show of the season for many of the local growers so the benches tend to be quite full with quality stuff. The car needs to be loaded tonight for a 6am start to drive the 54 miles in time for the 7.30 staging start. I like to get there early so I have a prime position in the car park before other exhibitors start to arrive. I washed a load of spuds last night and was quite pleased with the skin finish considering they've been out of the ground for a couple of months now. As the skins are now so hard I actually used the scourer side of the sponge to clean them up. Even the Winstons that were scabby cleaned up reasonably well although like a prostitute who picks off her scabs before a client enters the nobbles on the skin betray where the scabs were. Sturton has a class for 5 spuds 'size and quality' so it allows me to enter some large spuds that would otherwise be too big for any other show.

I usually put about 60 entries in but as I need to conserve my energies and produce for Westminster Show on Tuesday I've only managed to mackle 40 odd together this year, including a few entries in the dahlia classes and the cacti and succulent section. Talking of cacti I got a bonus 3rd at Malvern with this set of 4. There were around 15 entries so it was another good ticket to win. I don't know why the back two appeal to me so much but my missus reckons they sum me up as a person beautifully. They merely remind me of Harvey Smith for some reason.

Everlasting spuds

I've been experimenting with my spuds to see if I can save them from show to show. It's accepted that you can show things like onions and shallots in many shows, from August through to November and generally they tend to look better as they ripen. Marrows and pumpkins usually last several shows although you would have to take care transporting them. I have shown carrots on two different weekends but you do lose some colour and condition by the 2nd weekend.

I've always felt that spuds can only be shown once but got talking to a guy at Sturton who maintains he uses the same spuds throughout the growing season, by wrapping them individually in dry kitchen towelling after each show and storing them in a fridge. In fact, he pointed to a set at Sturton that had been out of the ground since early August and had been to several shows including Harrogate. By that time (3rd October) it was looking a bit rough at its base but it did manage a 2nd place (behind my fresher looking set). The potato in the photo was one of my winning set of white spuds from Sturton, the variety Winston, that I wrapped up and stored in the fridge. It's now 3 weeks since that show and I think it's looking pretty good and could certainly compete at local village level. I think if it's a single day show you could get away with it, but if the show is any longer than that then the spuds will start to go green quite quickly.

I shall certainly be trying this more and more next season. It will mean I can keep my better spuds for the more important shows and then show these same ones a week or more later at other shows, and also save me time as I won't have to scrub as many.

Celery rust

T'is a good job I'm not proud and only show my good stuff on this blog. I have many, many failures each season and by far the most pathetic of all my veg this season has been my celery. I only grow 5 plants in order to get a set of 2 for Sturton and did manage to get a 2nd (out of 2....the pair on the right!), but the quality was hopeless. Celery is a bog plant in the wild so it can take as much water as you can throw at it, and needs to be grown in good quality moisture retentive soil with added manure.

All was reasonably well until late August when once again they succumbed to celery rust disease. Within weeks the foliage was devastated and I had to take off the worst affected leaflets to make them reasonably ok to consider showing them. Asking around on the NVS forum I'm told Dithane 945 will combat this but you need to spray BEFORE you have the problem. Of course if the foliage suffers then the size suffers as a result so I didn't have very large specimens either. I've grown Red Star for the past 5 years (it's a Man Utd thing!) but I think I'll have a change next season and try Morning Star which seems to be the favoured variety on the NVS benches.

Better quality shallots

Earlier this year I managed to get 12 of National Champion Dave Thornton's shallots (He fought like a bugger but I managed to get them off him eventually).

I grew them on this season alongside my own retained stock and the difference between them was quite striking. Whilst my own 'seed' actually grew bigger the shape was all over the place, so I have now totally discarded these to the kitchen pot.

I now have about 30 bulbs from the Thornton strain for replanting next season. The best of these have bought me 5 wins in the shallot classes this season (including this one at Sturton last weekend), which is amazing considering that prior to that I'd only ever won a total of 9 shows with shallots in 13 previous years. I didn't get them to grow huge, but they were classically 'flask' shaped with nice flat bottoms. Next season I will give them a more favourable planting position alongside one of my raised onions beds in the hope of getting bigger specimens.

The year of the fly!

There is a school of thought that says carrot fly can only fly about 18" off the ground. People who reckon that are about as deranged as Rafa Beneathus when he says Liverscum are going to win the Premiership (sorry Mark the Ciderman!).

I've always had the odd mark but this year has been my worst ever. As you can probably see from my Sturton set above I had it quite badly, which obviously prevents me from showing at the highest level, which is annoying as otherwise I had some fair sized and decent shaped carrots this season. Part of my problem was that I didn't scatter some of my highly toxic (and probably banned!) insecticide around the crowns during the weeks when I was bravely fighting death due to swine flu!

But really I need to be making sure the fly have no way of getting to them by erecting some form of physical barrier and to this end I have bought some enviromesh to cover my long carrots/stump carrots and parsnips. I shall spend the Winter months wisely by mackling together some form of wooden cover to go around my drums and beds to which I will staple the mesh. Hopefully, I won't then have to rely on my insecticides so much. Organic shock horror! I must be going soft!

In the meantime I have given the sand a bloody good drenching with some cheap bleach in order to kill off any eggs. Phew.....he's back!

Now all I have to do is to get my seed and I've been promised some top notch stuff from an unbeatable Scottish grower who shall of course be nameless, but whose wife is absolutely hopeless at growing spuds!

Sturton 2009

Well thank goodness for my spuds! I lost the cup for most points in veg for the first time in 8 years to Bill Croft who I noticed was amongst the cards at Harrogate. I'm not surprised as he put some very good stuff in at Sturton. However, thanks to my cacti, dahlias and a bonus 2nd place in the photograph section I did win the cup for most points in the whole show for the 6th time.

As far as my veg was concerned I ran up 4 wins out of the 6 spud classes (round/kidney/coloured kidney and 3 sets of 3) and was 2nd in the other two (white kidney and size&quality).

I was also chuffed to stage this set of Sir Alf Ramsey dahlias, which didn't win but got a 'highly commended'. They just needed to open out a bit more. I've never grown this variety before but was given a tuber by Kev Broxholme (aka git) and managed to have 4 blooms ready on the day, the 4th one going into my 2nd place winning entry in the one flower/1 veg class. I shall certainly be growing this one again as the blooms are absolutely show-stoppingly huge, as you can see when you compare it to my head which is very big in order to house my incredibly large brain.

And so that's it for another season. I could do one or two late shows but I've had enough for now. The garden is a mess and I want to get back on top of things and get a head start for next season. I've already started sieving my compost for the spuds next season......I'm using the same compost as I didn't get any blight this season, but this time I'm making sure I sieve out all the lumps in order to get more refined spuds hopefully.

I plan to pick and choose what classes I enter next season and not try and enter lots of classes in every show, with a view to putting my best stuff in at Malvern in my quest to win a red card at the highest level. I think I can do it. All in all I had a good season but getting swine flu at a critical time meant the garden ran away from me a bit. Not being able to get decent leek and onion plants in the Spring meant I was a little bit half-hearted with everything else, especially as the recession forced me to be involved in some very upsetting redundancies in February and March. My heart just wasn't in it like it usually is. But seeing my stuff against the very best at Malvern showed me I don't have an awful lot of improvement to make to be able to compete. I could really do with winning the lottery or, better still, if there is an anonymous millionaire follower of this blog who would like to cover my salary then please don't hesitate to contact me!

Last knockings

It’s my final show of the year this Saturday in the village of Sturton in Lincolnshire. I’ve said before that it’s a small village with a big show and I think this is the 122nd annual show which is incredible when you think about it. My thoughts are with the show secretary Rebecca who lost her husband suddenly at the age of 52 in August.

I’ve entered 53 classes, not just in veg but also in dahlias, cacti and some photos! I think the pick of my veg will be my spuds. I emptied all my entries out of the compost they’re being stored in a week or so ago to have a look at them and was very pleased with the condition of them. Hopefully they’ll scrub up well and land me some wins in the 6 classes they have for spuds. I shall prepare half of them tonight as I think I shall need about 40 in all, which is too many to leave until tomorrow night.

After Saturday teatime it’ll be time to start ordering those seeds and thinking about next season. How the sands of time are swiftly falling through that hole!

Where I'm 'at' !

Medwyn Williams always says that how many red cards you get in the autumn depends on how much work you put in to the plot during the Winter and Spring, so if that's true I really hope I've got some good results to look forward to. I've been busy beavering away the last few weeks sowing seeds, potting on, planting and digging but like anyone who works full time I always wish I had more time to devote to my hobby.

My parsnips 'Pinnacle' and stump carrot 'Sweet Candle' are on a par with last years seedlings but yet again I fear disappointment with my long carrots. The Graeme Watson seed has failed to germinate in sufficient numbers and those that have look decidedly 3rd rate.

I've planted out my first cabbages and these seem to be growing away well. However, my brussel sprouts 'Abacus' are very small and I reckon I'll struggle to exhibit any in early October at Sturton. Despite failing abysmally on an annual basis with cauliflowers I'm having one final go albeit with the green curded 'Romanesco'. I'm hoping I can at least have a head of decent size that may be a useful addition to one of my trug entries. You never know, if I get two I can always enter it into the 'Any other veg' class as most shows near me have deleted the cauliflower class through lack of entries.

On the onion front, the variety 'Vento' (for the under 8oz class) is performing better than Tasco which has always been slow growing for me. I have plenty of 'Red Baron' and 'Setton' from sets, as this is quite a popular class around here. Apparently an experienced judge can tell if the onion has actually been grown from a set rather than seed but they all look the same to me. I shall try and 'pull' all my onions over a period of time once they have reached a set size (say 4" diameter for my large onions in the greenhouse or 2.5-3" for Vento and the sets) so that I have plenty of bulbs to choose from. This can start from about mid-July and last until late August but either way you want to be exhibiting a set of onions that has been out of the ground for at least 4 weeks so that they have had ample time to ripen.

All of my shallots have now been thinned down to four including the superb ones given to me by NVS secretary Dave Thornton. I will be amazed if they grow as big as their parent bulbs but I live in hope.

I sowed my first row of globe beetroot 'Red Ace' last weekend and another one this weekend. Another couple of rows will be sown for the next 3 weekends and should be enough to cover my season.

As yet my first peas and runner beans are just breaking the compost surface but there is no sign of life from my marrows sown early last week. I will be sowing more of these crops over the coming weeks.

I've just about planted all my spuds but I do have several 'Maxine' and 'Pixie' left over which I will endeavour to get planted up by the end of the month. Hopefully, these will give me fresher specimens for my later shows such as Sturton and (dare I say it?) Malvern.

In the greenhouse I have peppers/aubergines/lettuce/celery and cherry type tomatoes. I planted my first 6 'Cederico' tomatoes yesterday in the greehouse borders. I also have 4 pumpkin plants of the European record breaking pumpkin that was seen at Malvern last year. I shall plant these on the patch of land that I've been loaned in Sileby, in the hope I can at least get one to a couple of hundred pounds or so. Any bigger and I won't be able to physically transport it to any show in my car which is usually packed to the roof with my other produce.

On this extra patch of land I also intend to plant my surplus of onion sets and cabbages, as well as sowing more carrots (for the pot), beetroot, peas, french beans, courgettes and leeks (also for the pot only).

I've managed to take a few dahlia cuttings but am having to rely on some others from Kev Broxholme as my Kenora Sunset and Jomanda tubers are stubbornly refusing to wake up from their winter slumber. I really need to get these off him by next Sunday as I fear by that time he may never speak to me again if Man Utd send his beloved Hull back down into the Championship from whence they came!

All not lost on the long carrots

Unusually I've hardly staged any long carrots this season due to the failure of my first two sowings. The first failed in the cold snap in March and the 2nd struggled through the mini heatwave in April and May. When I eventually got some going it was far too late for them to be any good in the earlier shows. However, for Sturton I was able to pick up a 1st and 3rd as they'd had that extra month or so to grow. Although they were nice clean specimens they were far smaller than I've been used to in recent seasons

Osiris

Having used up all my Sweet Candle at previous shows I used a set of Osiris at Sturton to win the stump carrot class. I'd grown these in short pipes 'plugged' into the soil in my raised leek bed and filled with my usual carrot mix. They were a little coarse and heavy because of this and the 'whips' broke off very close to the stump end because they were into the soil rather than sand at that point.

I hadn't given them any TLC at all really and I did have some fly damage which made choosing a set not as easy as it had been with the Sweet Candle but all in all I think I'll give this variety another chance next season, sowing sooner and growing in a raised sand bed.

Another Pinnacle of success

I won the parsnips class at Sturton......my 6th win out of 7 shows this season....with the variety Pinnacle. The skin condition was still good although I did have a little canker spot on one of them, which I put in my 2nd place winning set.

I shall certainly be growing this variety again next season assuming I can get hold of some seed. I'm convinced that this is a better variety than any I've grown before, such as Gladiator and Princess. I used to struggle to get Gladiator to carry its weight all the way down.

I may just switch to a slightly stronger mix next year in any case.

2 more wins

Another couple of pleasing wins at Sturton in cucumbers (1st/2nd/3rd) and brussels (1st & 2nd). The brussel variety I grew this season was Abacus which is by far the best I’ve ever grown and gave me plenty of good sized, compact buttons to choose from.

My Carmen ‘cus’ were past their best as they had been on the vine for well over a week but were still good enough to win. Next season I may sow even later….say the end of June in order to have better cu’s for Malvern and Sturton.

Collection classes

As I’ve said before shows need to be imaginative when they produce their schedules, particularly the smaller shows and especially when it comes to the collection classes. Unless they’re going to offer big prize money it’s doubtful people will enter the collection that call for 6 ‘dishes’ of 3 or 5 specimens. Collections of this size are fine at large NVS shows and the like but are quite inappropriate at village shows. Sturton has a good idea by making it 6 single vegetables and I managed to get 1st and 2nd this year. Most growers will probably have one good specimen of each type and the class is useful for showing off all those good veg that are too large to match up with other specimens.

As you can see I put in two entries that were quite different to each other but I still put in 12 quality vegetables. I had one superb runner bean that I couldn’t match up in a set of 6 and one good shaped marrow that I didn’t have a partner for in the marrow class. At NVS shows growers will have large display boards draped in black cloth to enhance their veg but at most small village I like to keep things simple by just having the veg arranged attractively straight onto the show bench.

Another tomato win

My win at Sturton (in fact I was 1st and 2nd) with Cederico was my 6th win out of 7 shows this season, and I reckon I should have won the only show I didn't but hey-ho! I've had some lovely looking tommies this season justifying my feeding regime of alternate feeds of Tomorite, nettle 'soup' and comfrey 'soup'. I also thin my fruits out in the early stages when about pea-size, removing every other one which gives the remaining fruits more room to grow. I don't seem to get the flat sides so much these days where neighbouring fruits squash against each other.

I also managed to get 1st and 2nd in the class for a truss of tomatoes. I could have staged another set of 5 from the fruits on these two trusses.

Shallot dilemma

Well that’s thrown a spanner in the works! I won both shallot classes (exhibition and pickling) at Sturton unexpectedly. I say unexpectedly because as you’re running around concentrating and staging your exhibits you’re only half aware of the quality of the opposition, and I was half aware that there were some big looking shallots up against me so assumed I had no chance. It was only upon my return to the show after judging and I had the pleasing spectacle of 1st and 2nd prize cards in both classes that I realised mine were more uniform and in better condition than those of my competitors. These really were bonus wins and helped me to most points in show again.

However, my dilemma was that I was going to pickle all shallots after my last show and start again next year with fresh stock, as I didn’t consider their size good enough for competing at a higher level. They do seem to have ripened nicely as the weeks have progressed and I find it quite easy to pick a matching set…..it’s just they aint very big! I think I’ll keep a couple of handfuls back for the pickling classes and grow them well away from my new stock….there….decision made!

Les Stothard ponders what to call his latest dahlia......

Kev Broxholme (far left) to Les Stothard (2nd from left) "What about Blyton Geovanni, Les?"

Les Stothard "I think Blyton Rooney sounds better Kev"

70 and out

My winning entry in the one flower/one veg class (Kenora Sunset dahlia and Pinnacle parsnip) at Sturton was my 70th red card of the season which is a personal best (previous PB was 69 in 2005) . It's been a heck of a season and certainly my best in terms of the quality I've exhibited, particularly in parsnips, stumps and tomatoes.

Normally I'm quite sad at this time of the season as the showing year fades out but I'm now feeling quite hopeful of making the step up to a better level next season by competing at Malvern in the NVS Midland Championships. I will be lucky to win a card there and I'm sure I will have to take disappointment in my stride, but I'm sure that chatting to some of the 'big boys'can only help me make further improvements.

Sturton 2008

Sturton in Lincolnshire is a small village with a very big show. I had a good one this year (the 121st annual show!), winning 13 'red cards' for long carrots, stump carrots, parsnips, heaviest carrot, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, exhibition shallots, pickling shallots, tomato truss, brussels, collection of veg and one flower/one veg.

I was lucky enough to win trophies for most points in the veg for the 7th year running and the most points in show for the 5th time, although I have some way to go to match the record of the legendary Les Stothard with 22 wins! Best in show this year was for a marvellous set of leeks by a Mr I.Justice, and me 'ole mucker Kev Broxholme won most points in the flowers winning all 3 dahlia classes in the process. A good day then became excellent as I had a pint in the local pub as I watched Man Utd beat Blackburn and thus leapfrog Hull in the table! Phew!

Arsenal 1 Hull City 2

One good thing about this result is that I'll now have one less competitor to worry about in the dahlias at Sturton.......Kev Broxholme won't have sobered up until about next Sunday!