Almost time for lift off

For most of us the show season is now well and truly upon us and there’s diddly shit you can really do to alter the colour of the cards you’ll be winning, if any, apart from continuing to keep on top of the usual pests. My first show is not until next weekend, my local show, and for the first time for as long as I can remember I won’t be entering runner beans or cucumbers. That’s because I only sowed them with later shows in mind and after thinking I may even have overcooked those I am now thinking I’ll be getting some on the bench at either the Welsh Branch, or Harrogate, or Malvern, and certainly RHS Westminster in early October. The first fruits are now being allowed to develop on the cucumber plants, variety Carmen, now that they have ‘turned the corner’ at the eaves, where they have started to be trained horizontally to allow all fruits to hang downwards. This keeps them away from the foliage thus avoiding scratching and means you can manipulate them straight if they’re bent.

The runner beans are now forming although I’ve never seen plants with such little foliage. They do look quite bizarre but hasn’t seemed to affect the amount of pods. I could possibly get a set for my local show next weekend but I think I’ll wait a few more days to get a set up for the NVS Welsh Branch show in Carmarthen at the Welsh Botanic Gardens. You can start picking runner beans 5 or 6 days before the show as soon as they reach the size you require (I’m going for 14 or 15” plus the tail) and wrap in a damp cloth against a wooden batten to keep them fresh and straight and pop them in the fridge. Not too cold mind.

I have a row of Exhibition Longpod broad beans growing away against canes at an angle and the beans are about 2-3” long now, so no good for my show this weekend. Bit of chocolate spot but a Signum drench soon stopped that In its tracks. There is a class at the Welsh for 4 sets of legumes, but as I don’t grow peas I’m fucked, so these are destined for the kitchen I fear, but it has been a useful exercise to gather info on growing them to show if I ever get back into it in 20 years time.

Some of the first kohl rabi to be planted out are starting to swell so these will be too early for Malvern, but it looks like the 2^nd or 3^rd batch will probably be spot on, and I’m hoping the Kref in my polytunnel will be one of them. The variety in the photo is Kolibri and there are another 2 later sowings of this alongside, so my dream of becoming National German Turnip Champion are very much alive and well.

At Harrogate & RHS Westminster there are classes for chilli peppers and I have lots to choose from, albeit they are still green but starting to turn red soon I reckon. My banker variety Hungarian Wax (below) always gives me plenty of choice to make a selection from, but I’m not sure about a 2^nd one I’m growing this season called Cyklon. A case of the reality not quite matching catalogue photo I fear.

With 2 weeks to the Welsh Branch my dream of getting an entry at the British Tap Root Championships is hanging in the balance. My long beet are still quite small at the shoulder, barely an inch and a half diameter, but if they carry that diameter down for 10 or 12 inches then they may look ok. My parsnips, variety Victor, are also starting to concern me as they haven’t responded to the Chempak 8 feed yet and a number of them are looking quite spindly and therefore the root should also be quite small. At the beginning of the month I felt they were 3 weeks ahead of last season but they don’t appear to have grown much in the meantime. I do have quite a few large looking specimens so I’ll be saving these to try and get a set of 5 at the National, so I’ll have a decision to make as to which ones to pull for a set of 2 at the Welsh for the Tap Root Class. Decisions, decisions!

I’ve been picking tomatoes, variety Zenith, for the best part of 2 months, when I’m usually just starting to pick my first fruits so they are well ahead compared to previous seasons. It means I’ll have plenty to choose from for the next 2 weekends, including the Welsh where there are lots of top tomato growers to test yourself against. If I manage to get a ticket there I’ll be well chuffed.

For my local show I’ve been growing a fuchsia variety called Auntie Jinks that I rescued from one of last year’s hanging baskets. After taking advice I pinched out all shoots until 11 weeks before the show, then snipped off all the flower buds until 5 weeks before the show and I have to say it is going to be spot on in a week’s time once all these buds burst into flower. I haven’t grown a fuchsia for a show for several years, and I have found all the cocking about snipping and debudding quite therapeutic after a hard day at work I have to say. If you’re planning to show a fuchsia at your local show do make sure you tidy the plant up a bit, take off any foliage that is turning yellow and any flowers past their best, and give the pot a good wipe. There’s nothing that fuck’s a judge off more than getting his hands dirty on muddy pots.

So, over the next few weeks it’s going to get quite intense as you’re prepping for the show, but do take time out now and again to smell the coffee. It should be enjoyable, not stressful and you don’t want to miss little gems like these cyclamen I noticed growing at the foot of my conservatory wall today. Spiffin’.

And finally Dan Unsworth took to Twitter this week to strongly refute claims that he’s a gay dyslexic. Personally I think he’s in Daniel. And finally finally, the French man who invented beach sandals sadly died this week. RIP Philippe Phillope.

Gender agenda

Because i'm not doing as many shows this season i'm cutting right back on the varieties i'm growing, which has lead to some difficult choices. It's an easy decision to ditch things like pak choi (who the fuck eats that shit anyway?), spring onions, turnips, swedes, radish and kohl rabi. All these crops were on my list last season for Westminster and I failed to get a single dish of any of them on the table. They looked superb either two weeks before or two weeks after, but all the time they were taking up valuable plot space and needed tending, often to the detriment of more important crops. And they all ended up on the compost heap!




I want to have another crack at caulis so I've decided to ditch runner beans this year, and grow them in the land that is free'd up. I'm also cutting down on spud varieties. I really struggle to get a decent skin finish on white spuds after they've been in store for a month or two, so I'm only growing Kestrel and Amour which any imbecile should be able to grow well, even the northern ring pirates. I'll probably grow about 40 bags of each but before that I need to hack back a load of shrubs and reclaim some new land to grow them in which i'm not looking forward to one little bit. I really wish i'd got into vegetables sooner than I did, rather than planting every colourful, rampant shrub going as soon as we moved into our house in the early 90's.



I will always make sure that I leave room for a few broad bean plants, one of life's true delicacies. Broad beans are about the only veg I grow that I don't aim to show, and Leesa makes a mean bacon with broad bean in orange sauce dinner. I'm still in two minds whether to bother with marrows, a new class introduced for the first time at National level this year with the aim of getting new growers to have a crack. But instead of needing to find a pair they've ridiculously opted to make it a set of 3. Finding a good matching pair is hard enough, and the plants take up an awful lot of room so getting three is going to be amazingly difficult and takes it way out of the realms of a beginner's capabilities in my opinion.



As I want to ensure getting a dish of medium tomatoes at Harrogate(6) and Malvern(12) I need 'wall to wall' Cedrico in one 8'x6' greenhouse, although I won't be sowing these for another couple of weeks yet, possibly even the end of March. This gives me about a spare metre of run in a second greenhouse to grow some small fruited tomatoes (we don't call them cherry these days!) so I am going to be limited to just one variety this year, perhaps 6 plants crammed side-by-side in pots. And the choice couldn't be simpler, for me it has to be Sungold. A quick glance in Medwyn's/Shelley's etc catalogues and you will see varieties listed as the 'only one to grow' for the small fruited classes, such as Piccolo and Tastyno. I grew Harlequin last season after seeing Geoff Butterworth win with it at Westminster in 2010, and indeed I got a 3rd there in 2011 (below), but by Christ do the plants give you cause for concern. They grew in a real weird fashion, the leaves often twisting and corkscrewing, giving the appearance of being very sickly. But it didn't seem to affect fruiting and I picked hundreds of fruits from half a dozen plants, that were very tasty indeed. But Sungold still beats them for taste in my opinion and having come 2nd with it at Malvern, and Sungold beating my Harlequin to 2nd place at Westminster I'm gratified to see that judges aren't being 'snobby' about varieties that aren't normally in the tickets.

However, there is a proviso about staging Sungold, or indeed any tomato at a high level, and that is you need to hire yourself a woman. At 5am at Malvern on the Saturday morning I gave Leesa a bowl of Sungold that i'd hastily picked at midnight by torchlight and said 'plonk those on a board for me, they've got no chance but it's an entry'. When she showed me her effort 10 minutes later I couldn't believe how good they looked, she certainly has an eye for selecting a matching set of fruits, and I was rewarded with a 2nd of course. I very often ask her now to match up a lot of my veg, especially things like tomatoes and peppers, and she even selected my winning cylindrical beet for Westminster when I was adamant a different set was better. Medwyn once won the National with tomatoes on his wife Gwenda's selection so it does appear that ladies do have an eye for that sort of thing.

A week off.....

....so I've been catching up on the preparation of the plot and assessing where things are at. My first sowing of tomatoes Cedrico have been pricked out but these cold blasts we are currently experiencing mean they are confined to the conservatory for now.



I have had one parsnip pop through in the drums so the rest surely cannot be too far behind.



My Pendle leeks are not too bad, about the thickness of my thumb and a couple of foot high stretched out.



My shallots made good top growth eventually, but it was by far the latest I've ever experienced. I have been hardening them off during the day but bringing them back into the greenhouse during the night. I shall be planting these next week as soon as the weather improves.

This is the bed where the leeks and biggest shallots will be planted. I spread a full box of blood, fish and bone across the middle where the leeks will be planted and also several handfuls of seaweed meal for added nitrogen.

With an eye to a show in mid-July I have got these broad beans popping through now.

This old galvanised water tank has served me for several years as a water storage tank for my greenhouses, but has now sprung a leak. I drilled a few more large holes in the bottom, lined it with a couple of inches of broken crock and brick, and am now in the process of filling it with decent soil. The top few inches will be a mix of bagged sieved topsoil and sand.....more on my intentions for this in the coming weeks. All I'll say for now is .......Malvern!

As an experiment I've sown this old kitchen swing bin with some carrot seed 'early Nantes', as well as some old foot long sections of drainpipe set into the greenhouse border soil. I'm hoping to be able to get a set of 3 carrots for the same show in July that I've already mentioned. I sieved some compost and sand, well mixed in with some vermiculite, a handful of superphosphates, Vitax Q4, seaweed meal, lime and potash. They'll stay in the greenhouse until harvesting. These don't have to be top quality as it's only a small village show. If it doesn't work out I won't have wasted much time

One final thing, as the author of a blog where I try to wind up certain sections of mankind I've always been prepared for the moment one day, when someone walks up to me and, without warning, knocks me out...probably a Liverpool fan or an organic gardener or an animal rights activist. If you ever see me at a show lying unconscious on the floor you will therefore probably be able to guess what has occurred. So it was with some not inconsiderable trepidation of the arse-twitching variety that I was approached at the NVS North Mids District Association meeting the other night by an absolutely huge bear of a man who put his hands on my shoulders and asked me "Simon? Simon Smithyveg?" Just as I was expecting him to announce that he was Peter Snazell's brother, or the President of the Steven Gerrard Fan Club or the secret love child of Gordon Brown's mum, and as I was wishing I'd worn the brown underpants he said to me, "I read your blog and it's a cracking read", and he then proceeded to show me a Liverpool joke on his mobile phone. With that one act alone he quickly became one of my best mates! He also had some cracking advice on growing big onions which I'll reserve for next season. Cheers Bob!