Beet box

I think I may well have to take up stamp collecting instead of showing veg. There seems to be some sort of Bermuda Triangle around my tomato greenhouse as some aubergines have now decided to throw down their leaves in disgust.

Just outside the greenhouse this pepper plant also threw down its leaves overnight. Plants in pots next to it growing in exactly the same compost are doing fine.

And several of my Kestrel potatoes in bags are showing this weird yellow tipping on some of the leaves, although the rest of the foliage seems to be very glossy and healthy. Oh what a multitude of stress!

Dave Thornton reckons I should stick to growing radishes (at which I excel I might add), so with this in mind I have this fine row of 'Jolly' alongside my leeks just through in time hopefully for the 'any other veg' class at a show on 9th July. Sadly, there is no class for radish at the National but if there was I'd be a contender, no doubt about it.

This weekend I will sow one last row of Pablo beetroot with Westminster Show in mind, although in reality I've found that a set of three can come from rows sowed several weeks apart. Pablo does seem to be an easier beet to match up than Red Ace but it can produce all manner of sizes from marble to mangold all in one row. Having sown a row every weekend from mid-May I should now be well covered for all my shows but last season my best looking roots came from this old water tank filled with sieved compost from my own compost heap. I find you can grow them about 4" apart quite happily although leaf miners can decimate a bed if you're not vigilant. I've been spraying with Decis this season and haven't noticed any damage so far. I was hoping to time these for Llangollen for the Millenium class but as I won't have any tomatoes to go with them it looks like my local show the weekend after will benefit.

Beetroot needs a lot of nitrogen at first and once established I will also water in nitrate of soda and a dash of salt which is supposed to improve the colour. Growing in this tank with fine compost also means I can force my hand down the side of the root at harvest time and get as much of the tap root up as possible. Three globe beet just under tennis ball size, with long thin tap roots 8" long are what you are hoping for. And an appeal to some of those cheating bastards who coat their beet with some substance that means they still look wet after 2 days.....don't! Certainly at Malvern the schedule says something along the lines that any foreign substances will result in disqualification and hopefully other shows will follow suit, and not before time!

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

Long beetroots and long radishes

Mixed views on the long beetroot at the moment. The variety is Cheltenham Green Top which you never see on the benches at the big shows. Most growers go for Regar but I've always found it twists like a corkscrew for me. I prefer the skin finish on CGT. I've also suffered a bit with leaf miner which will affect the final size. The shoulders are about 2" diameter at the moment but I'm growing these with a view to pulling for the RHS Westminster show in October so they have plenty of time to swell out.



Next to the beet i'm growing some long Mooli radish again for Westminster. I grew some last year but found that they force themselves several inches out of the compost, flop to one side and the shoulders go green and manky as a result. When I visited Medwyns in May he was growing some for Chelsea and he said he sowed them several inches down from the top of the pipes, and that if you top up the compost as the shoulders start to emerge from the surface then it stops this happening.

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.

AOVeg

I only grew radish to add another variety to my trugs but I had a load of quite large ones left over so I bundled them together and entered them at Hathern in the 'any other veg' class. Won me a 2nd prize card!