A bug's life. And death.

It was major news recently that bugs in general must be in serious decline because it had been noticed that our car windscreens have not suffered the annual Summer splatfest, and the usual suspects such as Chris Packham and Bill Oddie were stating that this was a terrible thing for the future of mankind. Pair of cunts. The less bugs and nasties as far as I’m concerned the better, it means less unappetising damage on our veggies, and who knows we may not have to spray insecticides so much in future? I have noticed a pair of adolescent blackbirds seem to be constantly on the ground in my garden, only fluttering away at the last moment when I’ve approached so perhaps they are having to work harder looking for food if it is indeed less abundant. Whatever, I’m sure the bugs and beastie fuckers will return at some point, perhaps they’re just having a fallow year?

Tomorrow is my local show and much of my veg is up and prepped, including a pair of long carrots which I’m particularly pleased about. They were a couple of the smallest I could find, but still 8” around the shoulder, and carried their weight really well down the root, and were a reasonable matching pair and I’d be very surprised if anyone has better. If what I hope are my best specimens that I’m saving for later shows are the same then they could be quite special. However, the set of stumps that I pulled can only be described as utter wank. They are badly ribbed, too long and thin, and pointier than Japanese tourist. I was all set to abandon any attempt at the National Tap Root Championships of Great Britain next weekend, until I had a furtle on the bottoms of half a dozen bigger looking roots by excavating an inspection hole next to them, and delving my hand down for a fondle in the depths. They all seemed to have better defined stump ends and were all the same length so hopefully I can entice a matching pair from them. I replaced the sand so they can stay fresh until I need to pull next Wednesday night. Tonight I shall pull a pair of small parsnips, again leaving my best roots for bigger battles to come, and at the last minute wash a couple of sets of scabby spuds that I wouldn’t dare set on the benches at a National show, but which should still be in the tickets at the weekend if I can rub of the few small patches of scab.

A few admissions now. Back in late July/early August I harvested 9 nice onions for the 1 ½ kg class at Malvern but I’ll be buggered if I can get the fucking things to ripen. The key with getting large onions to ripen appears to be getting them harvested early, as the later you get them up the less likely they appear to want to ripen evenly. I’ve also had a couple go rotten at the base although there was absolutely no sign of any rot when I got them up. Fucking things. And you may remember the brilliant idea I had of getting the globe beet up when they reached size, cutting off some of the foliage and reburying them so that they didn’t grow any more. Well in that sense it was a success as they didn’t, but they did go a bit soft and of course the foliage went all floppy and thus no longer any good for showing, so all in all it was a fucking stupid idea that Mark Perry suggested I try.

I also started off back in the Spring by championing the powers of Perlka to keep your brassica beds free of club root, but despite using it I’ve lost so many caulis to this disease this season that I’m now struggling to get a decent cauli head to show anywhere. Next season I shall try watering dilute Jeyes Fluid into the planting holes, another remedy suggested to me in the past to see if has any better success. If that doesn’t work it was also Mark Perry’s idea. All in all I’m just wondering if my plot just needs a damned good ‘rest’ which is exactly what it’s going to get from next year, so that I can add lots more organic matter and perhaps experiment with compost teas and the like. Thinking about it, for over 20 years all my growing has been geared up to the show season, meaning that everything comes at once during September when we have so much produce we end up giving a lot away that isn’t show worthy or even composting it. It’s a bit of a criminal waste as well as a drain on the soil, so time will tell if a more relaxed regime, with successional sowing, little and often,  and a more all year round production cycle will give me healthier crops. Chris Packham would be proud of me. Cockney tongue tied cunt.

Have a good weekend, i'll be back on Monday with news of my first show exploits.

Cauli wally

Strange, unexpected things will always happen. Not a Labour win in the election tomorrow obviously, the British aren’t that stupid. Nor even Liverpool winning a cup, the Klopp bottlers will always be second best from now on. No, I am of course talking about the World’s worst cauliflower grower getting a ticket at the National Championships. This really happened to me in 2013 when I was placed 5^th at Harrogate. Prior to then I hadn’t grown a cauliflower worthy of the name. Every plant I’d ever put in the ground had succumbed to club root or cabbage root fly, often within days of them being planted out. I’d tried collars at ground level and various insecticide and fungicides all to no avail. I was about to give up attempting to grow caulis ever again when I heard about a product called Perlka at an NVS talk which was supposed to combat club root. A natural by-product of industry it claimed to sterilise the soil and was also a source of nitrogen, so I duly purchased some from Medwyns and decided to give it a whirl.

You have to be sure to apply it to the soil at least two weeks before you plant out your caulis so I’ll be doing my first bed today, doing the 2^nd/3^rd/and 4^th beds where I intend to grow successional crops over the ensuing weeks. I dig a hole where I intend to plant each cauli and sprinkle a spoonful of the Perlka granules in it, marking each position with a label. When I did this for the first time in 2013 the growth was immediate and unprecedented for me. I’d personally never seen such big caulis, they were actually bigger than my cabbages so it was an amazing turnaround. Being able to stage a set of 3 at the National Championships was something I could only have imagined previously, to actually get a placing and beating a multiple ex-Champion in the process was totally mental.

The problem with caulis is getting them timed for a particular show. Often you’ll get them hearting up the week before and they don’t last long before they start blowing, but all is not lost. After advice from a fellow grower I cut them with a 3” stalk, and trim the foliage so it’s an inch or so above the curd. The final trim level with the curd is done at the show. After a good wash with a hose jet to remove any dirt I immerse the whole thing in a sink of salty water. This causes any hidden slugs and snails to come to the surface gasping which can then be disposed of. After an hour in the water place them face down on dry towels for all water to escape. Once dry place a couple of sheets of kitchen towelling over the curd, wrap the whole thing in clingfilm but leave the stalk exposed. Then put it in your fridge, but not too cold as they can freeze if you’re not careful. You’ll need a very understanding better half as the fridge fills up with caulis in the days leading up to a show! They’ll last in good condition this way for a week or more.

Shitbits

I always try to avoid the danger of only putting the good stuff on here but to publicise my many failures also, so that those of lesser gardening skills (mainly from Yorkshire) can see that even I am not brilliant all the time. I've not mentioned my tomatoes for a while and that's because at one point I feared they were going a similar direction to last season, the foliage being very spindly, and the lower ones mottled and yellowing. I could rule out the cause of last year's disaster, namely cold, as I resisted planting until last May so I was left with a few options. The first one is that greenhouse border soil has become toxic. This is not as dramatic as it sounds, merely that a lack of Winter rains has caused a build up minerals which causes more harm than good to the plants. Dusting the planting trench with Q4 and Nutrimate may well have worsened that problem and is the reason why you should consider emptying out your border every 5 years or so and replacing it with fresh soil.

Now that is a lot of hard work and having spoken to former National Champion Gareth Cameron who has experienced similar issues in his onion beds, he offered me some alternatives. Gareth has researched this huge subject and I'll be speaking to him in more depth about it at Malvern shortly before he drinks me under the table, but he has been looking at 'compost teas' on the recommendation of compost guru Mick Poulteney. As a result I have been flooding the plants roots (via the watering pots) with dilute comfrey and nettle stews....not a compost tea exactly but a quick substitute as I needed something quick. I also sprayed the foliage with epsom salts just in case it was a magnesium deficiency, and i'm happy to note that the plants appear to be responding to this double-pronged treatment. In the Winter I will take some of the soil in the borders away and replace it with sharp sand, mixing it with the remaining soil, which is a practice recommended by the soil testing industry as an alternative way of negating the effects of year's of nutrient abuse on indoor growing media.....I guess on the basis that nutrients leach out of a sandy soil much quicker.

Despite harvesting my shallots before the secondary growth cycle had commenced (I think!) I've had many of my best ones either go double or split completely like this one. My apologies to any neighbours in the vicinity of my plot when I discovered this as some naughty words may have tumbled out of my mouth.

I can only assume this is weather related, as the scorching temperatures of May were replaced by the wettest June since records began. Ideally you want dry conditions from the beginning of June to aid ripening until the shallots are harvested, but it rained pretty much incessantly, causing many neolithic Yorkshiremen to consider suicide. The bulbs must have taken up so much water that this was an inevitable consequence. I do have quite a few that still look sound but to be honest I've now shoved the boxes into a corner of my garage and won't worry about them now until nearer showtime, when I will go through them and select the best, if there are any. What will be will be.


And finally I've been getting a little brassed off with my brassicas. I only managed to get 12 cauli plants to germinate although these continue to grow well and will be planted out soon enough. However, my Brigadier cabbages have been very slow to get going. They were planted out in the heatwave which made them sulk for a start, and then the cooler temperatures and incessant rain means they didn't really start growing so the plants aren't much bigger than those I planted out, although I'd have thought conditions should have suited them perfectly well. On top of that pigeons have located them and despite my dangly CD scarers I have had a couple get nibbled quite a bit, thanks to the feathery little fuckers.

Next year i'm going to look into the viability of pigeon traps using brassicas as bait as I am rather partial to a roast pigeon so I may as well get my own back and consume a few. If there's a glut the local cats will get a bonus. Wonder what fox meat tastes like?

Derby 2011

It seems strange to think that I probably won't be doing another show now until the Malvern National at the end of September 2012. In many ways I'm going to be 'taking a year out' as at this moment in time I don't intend to do any local showing next year, something I last did in 2000 when we had an extension to our house and I simply couldn't afford the time. The way I feel at the moment I just need to recharge the batteries and rethink my strategy from now on, as putting 30-40 entries in every weekend really takes its toll, and I didn't enjoy some shows as much as I should, in particular Malvern, Westminster and Derby all for different reasons.


For Derby I felt like shite, suffering from a severe dose of manflu in the days leading up to it, so I was chuffed to come away with 9 tickets. Pick of my bunch was a win in a Top Tray class of 8 entries thanks largely to a good set of 6 Cedrico tomatoes (at last!) that scored well along with 3 nice Sweet Candle stumps and 3 Kestrel spuds that weren't great in uniformity but did clean up nicely.

I didn't win with my globe beet which surprised me as that was the one class I thought was a nailed on ticket, even a first. I believe globe beet is the class that is the biggest lottery as it's usually well contested and indeed i've won shows where I didn't expect to so you win some, you lose some.

I was 2nd in the leek class, my set being the heaviest there but a strange bulge on one side of one of the barrels must have counted against me. I've never had it before but I think it's a side shoot and indeed you could see a secondary growth emerging from one of the leaf folds, almost like a mini-leek within the leek itself. Scottish Chair Jim Williams reported in the NVS magazine that he'd seen it on some of his leeks for the first time ever this season and wondered what the cause was. In my case i'm assuming it's stress related as I don't think I watered enough this season, especially during June, July and August when we hardly had a drop of rain to speak of.

I was 3rd in a strong parsnip class with 'Polar', a bit of canker (or was it carrot fly damage?) downpointing me. It's a shame I still get these markings as size and uniformity wise i'm on the money and the skins clean up pretty well too. I'm hoping that a thorough drenching of Jet 5 in the Spring will cleanse any spores and other nasties out of the sand as I hope to get a set of 5 at Malvern along with another three in the big collection class. When I got a best in show with 'Pinnacle' at Leicester Show a few years ago a respected fellow grower reckoned they would have competed at National level. They really did stand out and the skins almost shone but I've never had parsnips so blemish free since. I changed entirely to Polar this year as this variety was pretty clean for me last season but about 60% of them have been marked so I have a decision to make. Pinnacle is supposed to have the best canker resistance rating but does get a bit 'blocky' near the top I find so I'll probably stick to Polar as I think it has a more refined, tapering shape.

I always say you have to be in it to win it and I picked up an unexpected 3rd in the white spud class out of about 15 entries with Casablanca. These looked so bad on Friday night there was no way I could get them clean with a soft cloth so I had to resort to using the rough side of a scourer and rubbing the skin with that as hard as I dare. They looked reasonable when I staged them but as you can see by the Sunday afternoon they looked absolutely shocking. I'm not going to miss growing white spuds at all next season. They look magnificent when they're first harvested but boy do they deteriorate. Sherie Plumb must have some form of industrial buffing wheel in her kitchen!

I also won with brussel sprouts 'Abacus' at Derby, and with the trug prepared as usual by Leesa and which attracted an awful lot of interest from the general public, mainly from people enquiring about the little mexican gherkins that I use to fill in any gaps.

And so that's it. Time now to get the garden shipshape once again, install a new greenhouse that I intend to grow some decent onions in for once, and to get the old walking boots waxed ready for some Munros in Scotland in a couple of weeks time. I've learnt many things in 2011, proof that you will never stop learning and you need to store everything in the memory bank and take it with you into a new growing year. It's been my lowest haul of tickets for quite a few years because I did 4 less local shows than usual and tried my hand at a National Championships and Harrogate for the first time instead, but I feel I've still grown some of my best stuff ever, particularly stumps, leeks and celery that didn't look out of place at the highest level. I got more satisfaction from seeing my veg alongside the very best and winning nowt than I did winning 30+ tickets at my local show. And most important of all (by far!) I made some new friends at these new shows that I am looking forward to spending many more social evenings with in future years.

Problems with wind

In response to a fellow blogger Dickie Nine Inch (he likes those fairground mirrors that distort everything) from Kent who is having trouble keeping his onions erect in high winds, this is a perennial problem and you need to take precautions when growing onions outside if you want to harvest nice symmetrical bulbs that aren't lop-sided. If the neck of the onion is blown over it effectively ceases to grow thereafter, as the soft tissue inside the stem will undoubtedly have been damaged. You have a couple of options but both necessitate supporting your foliage.

This season I've tried growing some of my onions for the 250g class in the greenhouse in pots. This gives you the advantage of not suffering from wind damage at all but I was still finding the weight of the foliage pulls the bulb over to one side and a cane a green clip is required to keep things growing gun-barrel straight upwards. So far I'm having mixed success with this method and need to give it some more thought. My Vento are very slow to start bulbing up and I think the foliage isn't big enough to get them even up to the 250g size. I also tried some red onions this way but they were a total waste of time. The foliage looked good but I ended up with bulbs barely golf ball size. No doubt it's to do with the mix, but as it was a last minute decision as an experiment I filled each pot with equal parts compost, soil and vermiculite with some Vitax Q4 and Nutrimate. I shall have to take some more guidance because as a method it undoubtedly has merit, and has the added advantage of there being no chance I will suffer from white rot as I used was sterilised bagged soil.

But the majority of my onions for the 250g classes are still growing away in a raised bed outside, most of them the mysterious variety 'Frisco' which seems to be doing ok so far. I have had white rot in this bed in the past and despite sterilising with Basamid I have lost a couple already I noticed yesterday. I also support these plants with a small green cane and clip and despite some quite high winds blowing through the Smithyveg plot in recent days they all remain upright and proud, and therefore still growing away!

I had a call last week from the NVS legend of this class, Ron McFarlane who in his day was unbeatable with the variety Toughball. He was very surprised when I told him I had not yet harvested my 250g onions as his had been up a week, but then he is about 150 miles further south-west from me in Wales. It is quite surprising and enlightening to talk to different growers around the country to hear tales of vegetables being way advanced to mine but then I had to remind myself that I have always started my showing from the end of August and very rarely entered shows earlier than that. My timings are all worked out accordingly. The last couple of years I have entered a village show in early July and grown a few crops specifically for it but this has been unusual. As far as i'm concerned my 250g onions have always started to bulb up from around now and I've started harvesting them when they reach size from the end of July and into August. It means the skin finish is not very ripe for the early shows but they soon improve during early to mid-September and I managed a 3rd at Westminster in early October and also at Derby in late October.

I may well be tempted to enter at Bakewell Show on the 4th August but there will be no way I shall have any onions ready for that. If i'm going to start extending my showing season I shall have to think about the way I grow my onions and this can only be improved by giving them better growing conditions at the front end of the season, namely more warmth and light.


It's about this time of the year that everything on the plot looks near enough spot-on. Thanks to my NVS membership I'm able to take advantage of cut price offers on insecticides and fungicides that you simply cannot buy in the garden centres and the foliage on my crops is looking truly exceptional as a result.

Most years at this time I go on holiday and it's therefore about now that things start to get out of hand as I rely on someone else to do watering duties. There really is no substitute for being on hand yourself to spot things as they start to go wrong or better still act to prevent things going wrong. However, this year we're not going away on holiday as instead I've decided to work through my holiday entitlement in order to pay more tax so that the teachers can retire at 55 on a mega-pension bless 'em. The butterflies keep flitting over my brassicas but because they've been sprayed regularly with Decis they really don't seem to like it and i'm struggling to find the usual clusters of eggs under the leaves. I'm only finding the odd single egg instead. Does anyone know how Decis works?


There's been a real explosion of aphids in the country and Leicestershire is no exception. One of my pea plants is a strange mix of clean green growth for the bottom 10" then a mottled, twisty yellow growth above that which I'm assuming is as a result of a virus passed on by aphids sucking the sap.

I've asked for advice on this from National pea champion Ian Stocks whose title I will be taking in a few weeks time but had no reply yet as i'm tempted to cut the virussy bit off and grow a side shoot up the cane from the good green bit. I can only assume he doesn't want to tell me how to beat him so I will act under my own intuition...always a dangerous thing I find.