Go go goch

With my first ever foray into the upper eschelons of the National Championships now less than three weeks away I've just about finished my transportation boxes so that I will at least look as if I know what i'm doing when I turn up, rather than some ill-prepared oik. In truth i've been promising myself I'd do something like this for several years after many near flattened veg experiences and stressful journeys to shows. I now have separate wooden boxes for shallots, 250g onions, peas, cucumbers and tomatoes. Before Llangollen I am also going to be making myself a larger, longer box for my long carrots and parsnips and will be trying to make it in such a way that the other boxes fit inside it so that I only have one box to carry into the show, although I may need the Welsh Guards to help me carry it! Now I can drive to shows like Lewis Hamilton rather than Lady Hamilton, knowing my veg is safely packed and cannot roll about or have other objects fall on them. It will be a huge relief.

As for the veg I intend to take it would appear that I was a liiiiiittle hasty threatening the Scots with total pea domination. Despite my marestail brew and suffering a bollocking off the missus for using her best saucepan to produce it my peas have started to get mildew! I will now have to eat humble pie in Llangollen and polish Mr Stocks' shoes with my tongue each morning at the hotel. He has told me to pick off any mildew infected leaves and hope that it doesn't get to the peas before the show. Personally, I think the mildew will win the race.

I've almost tied all my shallots but I have a dilemma with the picklers. I have 18 from which to get my set of 15 but I fear one or two may be going a bit soft and I don't want to risk a 'NAS' (not as schedule) card at Llangollen. I have some other really good shaped solid bulbs that are measuring about 30.4mm on my digital micrometer so I'm going to try and get an NVS shallot ring to see if they pass through. They have to pass through easily under their own weight and the use of a hammer to get them through is strictly frowned upon apparently. I'm hoping that the ring is machined to over 30mm and as I noticed several winning sets at last year's NVS and RHS shows where the bulbs appeared to be well over 30mm so I'm hoping I'll get away with it. In theory the judge will pass each shallot through the ring and 'NAS' any exhibit with any non-conforming bulb. Indeed, I've asked Dave Thorton if I can go over to his house and put my bulbs through his ring!

I also hope to be taking a set of french beans and runner beans with me. The runner beans are already cropping fantastically well so it's a case of picking off all the eatable pods before they get 'beany' which means the plants stop cropping so productively. Those that are a couple of inches long this weekend should be perfect in two weeks time so I'll earmark at least a couple of dozen with bits of string and tease them to grow straight, maybe even cutting off their near neighbours so that all the energy in the truss goes into just one bean and that they hang down clear of the foliage and don't go bent, which is easy to do thanks to my sturdy angled bean fence. I shall need a set of 15 anything up to 18" long, all like peas (sniff!) in a pod. It's a long time since I won with runner beans even at local level so i'm being an ambitious arsehole yet again!

As I have drastically cut down on my local shows I'm also going to try and pull a set of 5 'Sweet Candle' stumps. If the foliage is anything to go by then I should have some good'uns deep down in yonder sand bed.

Sadly, without x-ray vision I'll never know until Friday 26th August long after my entry form has been posted! I just hope the stump ends have formed by then as these would only have been in about 19 weeks by Llangollen weekend when in an ideal World they take between 20-22. A fellow NVS grower (and another Scot) is hoping to table a set of 'Abaco' stumps which are the old 'Favourite' shape and have potential to beat 'Sweet Candle'. We shall have our exhibits independently judged after the proper judging (surely neither of us will win a card?!) and the loser buys first pint. It could well turn out to be a weekend of severe Smithyveg buttf***ing at the hands of the Scots, but my pride will hopefully remain intact. Now, I wonder what boot polish tastes like? And does anyone know any good chat-up lines for sheep?

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction

One of the downsides of being one of the best looking men in the World is that God sees fit to counteract your facial good fortune by bestowing all manner of pestilence and disease upon thee!

He has populated the Earth with many creatures that appear to serve no useful purpose and chief among these in my opinion is the flying rat otherwise known as the wood pigeon. Many years ago I planted my cabbages out and nipped back inside for a quick cup of tea before netting to keep the buggers at bay. I'd been gone no more than 10 minutes but when I returned my brassicas had been stripped and a couple of pigeons were hurriedly trying to take off so fat were they having consumed all my hard work!

I'd planted out these kohl rabi with a view to trying to get them ready for the show in July when I found this scene of carnage the other night.

I should have known better than to plant them without protection but nethertheless it still pisses you off when you see it. My favoured method of deterrent is some string above the plants with some old CD's dangling down just above the plants. I was told a few years ago that pigeons don't like to see things above them and whenever i've done this I've never had problems with them so it does appear to work despite the plants still being easily accessible if they so wished to take another gobble. Bastards.

The Casablanca potatoes that i'm growing in pots also have these strange brown speckles on the foliage.

I asked Dave Thornton what they might be but he was as much use as a chocolate teapot, sending the picture text as I did whilst he was on a night out with friends. He was so pissed that he text me back saying that he loved me! I never did find out from him what these marks are so I'll just have to hope they're not significant as these spuds will be coming up in a week or two. In the meantime Dave has decided to choose Llangollen to finally come out of the closet!

On Friday it was time to sow my 'Prince' french beans with a view to having them ready for Llangollen which is now only 11 weeks away. There is a right way up to sow beans and I always seem to get 100% germination when I do it this way. If you look at the 'scar' on the bean you should see what look like two small bollocks at the bottom of it. The beans should be sown this way up, with the bollocks towards the bottom. Kinda makes sense when you say it like that really!

My leeks are looking better than any I've had at this time of the year and I've now put them on their first collars, which are 12" tall, and have run a couple of horizontal supports alongside the plants to support the flags. I've also sprayed them with Dynamec to ward off thrips which have rendered my leeks useless for anything other than local showing in recent years. The thrips inhabit the growing point of the leek, hiding right inside the new growth emerging from the 'button'. So therefore you have to use a high pressure spray to really force the insecticide inside the leaf layers. Spraying over the outer foliage will have no effect whatsoever.

I sat next to Mark Roberts at a DA talk the other night and he wore the self-satisfied smile of someone who had some exceptional leeks growing away. I've seen photos of his Nuneaton plot on Facebook and they really were something to behold, and Mark was hoping to win the National again for the collection of 6 as he did in 2007. Later that night he text me in a dejected state as he'd got back to find just about all of his leeks had gone to seed. Back in Winter some jealous twat had got into his garden and switched off his power. Presumably his plants got a check that night which meant they were doomed from that point on. I hope that person is proud of himself and suffers a premature end to life.

Oh, and as I speak it's absolutely wazzing down outside. Severn Trent......any chance you might actually catch some of it?

And remember the golden rule of life.....

Northern sowing dates

Further to my post the other day with John Branham's sowing dates here are the dates for those of you who live in northern rat'oles such as Huddersfield, Ingleton and Leeds. These are the dates of Bob Herbert from Mosborough, near Sheffield and bear in mind these dates first appeared in Medwyn's column 10 years ago so may of the varieties have since disappeared or at least have been usurped by better show varieties. The first sowing date was for a show on Aug 26th and the second for a show on September 29th.

I reproduce these dates exactly as they were published but I cannot for the life of me see how the tomato sowing dates can be correct. Dave Allison and Medwyn have agreed to revisit this idea with a new set of growers for the January 2011 edition of Simply Veg, the NVS quarterly magazine after I'd prompted the pair of them. Something to look forward to and even more reason to join the NVS!

Kind	Cultivar	1stShow Date	2ndShow Date	Comments
Globe Beet	Pablo	17thApril	7th July
Long Beet	Regar	8th April 22ndApril	28thApril 12thMay	Grown in 40 gallon drums
Broad Bean	Jubilee - Hysor	6th May	One sowing	sown in cold greenhouse in 4 inch pots
Green Cabbage	Marathon	25thFebruary	17thMarch	Sown in cold greenhouse in 40 modules potted on into 4 inch pots in J Innes compost
Red Cabbage	Autoro	11thFebruary	10thMarch	Will hold well in rows
Runner Bean	Stenner selection	6th May	9th June	Sow in 4 inch pots in greenhouse
French Bean	The Prince	17thJune	21st July	Sow in 4 inch pots in greenhouse
Carrots Long	Own Selection New Red	4thMarch	7th April	Grow in 40 gallon drums on top of raised beds filled with sand
Carrots Stump	Gringo and Yukon	8th April	21stApril	Grown on raised beds filled with sand
Cauliflower	Virgin, Beauty and Mexico	27thMay	16thJune(Amerigo and Virgin)	Sown in Multicell 40s, potted on into 4 inch pots
Trench Celery	Own sel Ideal Evening Star Red Star Morning Star	28thJanuary 4thMarch 4thMarch 4thMarch	3rdMarch 7th April 7th April 7th April	Start them off in a propagator at 70F. Pot on into 4 inch pots using J Innes 1 and then into 5inch pots in J Innes 3
Cucumber	Carmen and Jessica	1st July	27th July	Sow in propagator at 70F when germinated pot on into 4 inch pots
Lettuce Butterhead	Nancy	17thJune	21st July	Sow in Cold greenhouse in Multicell 40s
Table Marrow	Table Dainty	1st July	29th July	Sow in propagator at 70F then pot on into 4 inch pots
Onions over 250 gram	Re selected Kelsae	28thDecember	one sowing	Sow in propagator at 70F then pot on when at seedling stage
Onions under 250 gram	Buffalo, Bison and Toughball	14thFebruary	One sowing	Sow in propagator at 70F then pot on when at seedling stage
Parsnips	Gladiator and Javelin	25thFebruary	11thMarch	Grown in 40 gallon drums of sand
Peas	Show Perfection	13thMay	3rd June	Sow in cold greenhouse in 4 inch pots
Potatoes	Winston Kestrel Maxine Harmony	22ndApril	26thMay	Grow in black polythene bags using peat based compost
Radish	Cherry Bell	15th July	18thAugust	Grow in Gro bags and keep well watered
Tomatoes	Cheetah Goldstar and Typhoon	20thMay	20thJune	Sow in propagator at 70F in Multicell 40s. Transplant young seedlings into 5 inch pots in J Innes 3
Turnips	Purple Milan	1st July	4thAugust

Sow date planning

Many years ago when I were but a young lad with hair on by head instead of my back, sack and crack, Medwyn ran a series of articles in Garden News on the sowing dates of top showmen in different parts of the country. It was a great help at the time to novices like me (I still consider myself very much a novice by the way!) as I was finding that I was way too keen to get things started in the Spring and my produce was running out of steam by mid-September. A lot of my exhibits were way past their best on the benches because they hadn't been exhibited at their optimum of condition. I'm thinking in particular of things like tomatoes, cabbages, cucumbers, beans and caulis which I can't grow anyway. The idea of making more than one sowing to time them for a particular show wasn't something I'd yet hit on to.

So in response to a question i've been asked here are the answers supplied by John Branham of Aylesbury in Bucks. He was asked for two dates, one for a show on 26th August and the other on 29th September. Some of the varieties he grew have long gone but quite a few still hold firm.

Globe beet (Red Ace) May 13th & June 1st
Long beet (Regar) May 1st and May 15th
Broad bean (Bunyard's Exhibition) April 15th (1 sowing only)
Green cabbage (Hamilton) March 1st & March 16th
Red cabbage (Autoro) Feb 1st (1 sowing only)
Runner bean (Lovejoy) May 31st & June 20th
Long carrots (New red Intermediate) April 8th & April 28th
Stump carrots (Barbados & Gringo) April 20th & May 10th
Caulis (Virgin) June 1st/16th/25th
Celery (Evening Star) Feb 25th & Mar 14th
Cucumber (Carmen) May 15th & June 10th
Marrow (Table Dainty) June 20th & July 1st
Large onions (Kelsae) Jan 1st (1 sowing)
250g onions (Toughball) Jan 1st & Feb 15th
Parsnips (Gladiator) March 8th & March 28th
Peas (Show Perfection) June 1st/15th...impossible to get peas on bench late Sept!!
Potatoes (Winston/Amour/Kestrel/Maxine/Harmony) May 1st (1 sowing only)
Radish (Summer crunch) July 28th & Sept 1st
Tomatoes (Solution & Shirley) Feb 15th & March 15th

If anyone wants the same info supplied by Charles Maisey (South Wales), Jim Williams (Scotland), Bob Herbert (South Yorkshire) or John Soulsby (North east) let me know and i'll reproduce those too.

Weeeee are the chaaaaampions...........

This was a good weekend. United won a trophy (albeit the minor Community Shield) against Chelsea 3-1 and yesterday I collected the 3 trophies I won at a show back in July. I had left them with the organisers as they keep them to get them engraved. This is always a nice touch I find and it is good to see your name on a piece of silverware. More shows should do this but I guess it can be an unnecessary expense. Still, it's a nice feeling to start cluttering up the trophy shelf again. Liverpool and Arsenal can only dream of that!



I spent most of today pottering and tweaking, or as my wife likes to call it....fannying about. At this time of the season there's not a lot more you can do but keep things ticking over as most of the hard work should have been done. On the NVS website some of the lads are posting photos from their shows so you can get an idea of what quality is going to be put on the benches in the next few weeks.

My Cedrico tomatoes are growing pretty well. Because I wanted to have plenty to choose from at Malvern at the end of September I sowed them later than usual, with the result that I have lots of green fruits and my first shows only 3 weeks away. With this in mind I placed 3 ripe bananas below 3 of the oldest plants in order for the ethylene gases to rise up and encourage the lower fruits to start ripening. This really does work.



The photo below shows how I water them. I water into the inverted plastic bottles that are buried well down between the pots so that the water gets straight to the roots. Feeding is done into the pots where the plants are growing, although I will feed into the pop bottles from now on to keep the soil surface as dry as possible. Tomatoes like it hot and dry and any moisture can cause mildew on the fruits so it's important to water carefully and not splash about.



I'm being told that Sweet Candle is growing amazingly well for just about everyone so the big shows should be quite a sight at the stump carrot section. The foliage on my plants is almost bursting out of the enviromesh, and the shoulders are absolutely huge. If they are the same size all the way down I can't wait to harvest them. I gave the foliage a quick spray with epsom salts which I'm told can enhance the colour of the root. This bed of 24 carrots was grown specifically with Malvern in mind and I am prepared to pull the whole lot to get a set of 3.



Mixed fortunes with my long carrots but this bed has improved dramatically in the last month or so. You never know.....I may yet have some quality specimens under here.

After harvesting my Winston spuds (pile of shite) I filled these pots with the old growing medium and a few added nutrients, and sowed a couple with radishes and 3 with turnips. The radishes will be ready in 4 weeks and will be used as gap fillers in my trugs. The turnips should be ready in 10 weeks or so and can be entered in 'any other veg' classes, useful in later shows. The rest of the pots are spare Kestrel potatoes that should give me some new spuds on Christmas Day.

My celery has had to fend for itself but is doing reasonably well. I intend to put a polythene cover round them soon as I shan't be showing these until October and the cold nights can soon make them look a bit limpid.

In the raised bed I grew my pickling shallots harvested in June, then some lettuce for the July show (I didn't win!) I am now growing these 'Prince' french beans. These should be cropping well in time for Sutton Bonington and may last until Malvern.

Back at the wheel!

Yup....I'm back. Tanned, rested and raring to go! However, one thing is for sure. As long as I remain partial to a foreign holiday in July or August I'll never be a top showman. The really top growers would never leave their plots at such a critical time. My daughter has done a stirling job.....well, at least considering her previous attempts.....but I have come back to quite a few problems none of which she could have done much about. If I had been here I could have done something about things sooner.

My runner and french beans are severly infested with blackfly and will need to be sprayed over the next few days to bring things back in line. My Vento onions succumbed to thrips and stopped growing a while ago by the look of things. I may get a set or two but I'll be lucky if I do. Most of my long beet have been infested by leaf miner and appear to have stopped growing.

However, t'is not all doom and gloom. My Sweet Candle stump carrots are going mad and the foliage is positively bursting out of the enviromesh frames. I couldn't resist a scrape at the top of one and was nearly creaming myself at the size of the shoulder. I just need to keep an eye out now and make sure they don't push themselves upwards out of the sand which can cause the shoulder to go green.

My cabbages are still very healthy and the green netting has stopped any cabbage whites getting in. Growing off the ground in the large bottomless pots appears to have helped also, giving good air circulation.

And checking back in my diary I realised it was 12 weeks since I set my Winston potatoes away, which is plenty of time for that particular variety. The foliage was yellowing off and flopping about all over the place. I had a bit of a furtle in the compost in one of the bags and felt a few good tubers, so tonight I cut back the foliage from all the plants. Under no circumstances should you empty out the bags at this point. The skins will be far too soft and any handling will render them useless for showing. No matter how tempted you are you have to leave the bags for at least a week to let the skins harden. Tomorrow I will bring all the bags into my garage and forget about them for a couple of weeks. Then I will empty them out one by one and sort them into sets, putting them back into pots of dry compost fully labelled. I will wash them a day or two before the show. My other varieties need a few more weeks and the foliage is still nice and lush with no sign of blight

More on the plot later when I can hopefully include a few photos.....seeing as our youngest daughter conspired to leave our camera on the plane on the flight out to Rhodes I may be a few days before I can fire up the old camera which is more of a chore to download from. Anyone waiting to see holiday snaps of my semi naked body is going to have to make do with a few grainy shots from our mobile phones......unless of course you beg me not to publish them!

Straightening your bendy beans!

Take one bent french bean....leave it for an hour at room temperature after cutting....














Apply gentle and steady pressure in the opposite direction to the bend for a minute or two. ....















Voila! Now it's one straight bean! Runner beans take a little more care and attention but they can be straightened too.

Shall I, shan't I?

I was toying with the idea of sowing my first runner beans this weekend. The reason being that based on my usual sowing date of mid-May I often don't have decent beans for my first 2 or 3 shows and my best ones tend to come in the 3 week period between my last two shows. Typical! However, if we have a hot summer they can be gone past their best well before the end of August and a hot summer has been forecast!

I have some seeds given to me the legendary Les Stothard from Blyton and he says on no circumstances should I thin the clusters of beans as they will grow far too long! He says they'll get to 18" without being beany no problem....assuming I grow them well of course!

The beans below are Sherie Plumb's winning Malvern entry. What I wouldn't give to have a set of beans remotely as good as these....

Next year's varieties

Long carrot – Resel. New Red Intermediate from Graeme Watson
Parsnip – Pinnacle (Medwyns)
Stumps – Sweet Candle (Medwyns/Shelleys)
Potatoes – Kestrel/Maxine/Winston/Pixie (ESP)
Tomatoes – Cederico (Shelleys)
Cherry toms – Sakura and Sungold (DT Brown)
Onions and leeks – bought in plants from top growers
8oz onions – Vento (Medwyns)
Shallot – Hative de Niort (new stock hopefully!)
Celery – Red Star (Medwyns)
Beetroot – Red Ace (Shelley)
Cabbage – Globemaster (Medwyns) Kilaton (DT Brown)
Red Cabbage – Autoro (Shelley)
Runner beans – seed from a secret source!!!
French beans – Declic (DT Brown) & Purple Speckled (own saved seed)
Peas – Cavalier (DT Brown)
Marrow – Blyton Belle (own saved seed direct from Les Stothard breeding line)
Pumpkin – sent off for some from the grower of the recently crowned european record (should be fun!)
Courgette – Ambassador (DT Brown)
Lettuce – Sunny (DT Brown)
Brussels - Abacus (Medwyn)
Caulis – bollocks to caulis!!!

Still mild

Such mild weather we're having........here in Leicestershire we still haven't had a proper frost and my dahlias are still flowering. However, I think I'll dig them up this weekend come what may and start the storage process. I'll take some pics and post them over the weekend.



I've sourced a good supply of well-rotted cow muck and need to get that collected in the next few weeks. I'd like to get it spread on the plot by the end of the month so the worms can start to do their stuff. I'll also put a sackful to one side to soak in a barrel of water in the spring for a liquid feed for the celery, beans and peas.



All the seed catalogues have come and I've more or less decided what varieties I want to grow next year. As I said before I'm drastically reducing the selection so I don't get too bogged down growing what I term 'non-essentials' in the show world...........radish/chard/okra/turnips etc. I only grew them last year to make up a different take on the trug and basket classes.



Between now and Christmas I need to have a damned good tidy in my garage and greenhouse. I have pots/compost/tools/old seed packets etc all over the place and need to get things back to a level of normality and good organisation ready for the next season. What tends to happen as I'm running around at show time preparing different veg and loading the car is that things get thrown down where I last used them, despite my best intentions. I have a load of old Beano and Dandy books that could go on Ebay......the proceeds can go towards my seed purchases!

Collection

2 more shows over the weekend and one class I was particularly pleased to win was for a small collection at Littleover in Derby. You need a vase of 3 flowers (choose from dahlias/chrysanths/gladioli/annulas etc) and 3 sets of 3 veg (choice from about a dozen different kinds)

I staged 3 Jomanda dahlias, 3 Winston potatoes, 3 Cedrico tomatoes and 3 Purple Speckled french beans, managing to beat the guy who usually wins it by half a point.

The whole show is a credit to those who organise it and is always well supported, the quality of the flowers in particular being above most other shows of it's size. I staged on Friday night and because I didn't get away as early as I wanted it was 8.45pm before I got there. However, the organisers didn't mind waiting for me to finish and it makes the effort all worth while when you are welcomed at a venue like that.

One problem I've been having all summer is 'open centres' on my dahlias and was wondering if it was a cultural problem (i.e. my fault) or to do with the hot summer. I took the opportunity to ask a guy called Paul Harvey who is a top dahlia showman and a bloody nice guy to boot. He said he didn't know why it happened which was good enough for me. If it can happen to him then what chance have I got?