Cock a looky at my leeky

Not shown my Pendle leeks on here in a while. I'd bought two batches from different sources and the later purchased batch went to seed in early July leaving me just 12. Of these 2 went to seed in early August and 2 more succumbed to maggots as the base.

On the whole, and considering I haven't really given them any attention, I'm very pleased with the ones I have left although I have suffered quite a bit with leek moth nibbling the flags. Next season I really will have to erect an enviromesh framework over the raised beds. If I can keep the foliage cleaner I reckon I can grow leeks to a pretty high standard. As it is I shall only be exhibiting at local level with leeks this season. Because I have persuaded a few local shows to reduce the leek class from 3 to 2, it means I can enter 3 or 4 shows with quality specimens.

In the Spring I did give the beds a really good sprinkling of blood, fish and bone (half a box per bed) plus an ample scattering of seaweed meal a couple of weeks before planting, remembering that leeks need a good amount of nitrogen early on.

Solving the scab

It's not a widely known fact, but a fact nonetheless, that a highly intelligent mind can sometimes be blind to something that should be bleeding obvious and it needs someone with a far inferior intellect to point it out to you. Indeed, sometimes it merely requires a cerebrum the size of an amoeba to make you aware of it.

Anyway, I digress. Back to veg. I'm indebted to Dan Unsworth for questioning whether the scabby skin finish on my Winston spuds could be down to the fact that I watered them from a tap. Being in a hard water area it could be that this, coupled with the fact that we exhibitors use a lot of calcified seaweed has done for my spuds this season. I know Ian Stocks in Scotland has suffered the same problem and today Dave Thornton emailed me to say every single one of his Winston were scabbed up too (tee hee!). Meanwhile Dan has not watered his Winston as he doesn't have mains water on his allotment and his spuds seem top notch. He was a lucky first timer last season with his Sweet Candles so maybe it's the same this year with his potatoes. Maybe not. Maybe there is something in it.

Scientifically, the lads on the NVS forum say that the scab causing organism is suppressed at a pH of 5.3 and under so if you water with hard water you're possibly going to raise the pH. Also, it can stay in the soil/compost so if you're a cheapskate like me and you re-use the compost you increase the likelihood of getting it next season. Any scab on your seed potatoes should be cut out before planting.

So, a decision has to be made. My wife can stop reading from this bit now. Next season I shall be using seaweed meal instead and getting fresh bags of compost in at huge expense to the Smithyveg household.

Minnie and Ester put on weight.

As I suspected the first pumpkin Dawn that stopped growing had gone soft at the base so I cut her off the middle plant tonight. She is now destined for pumpkin cake. Other small pumpkins have formed on this plant so one of these will be allowed to grow on.


However, the pumpkins on the two other plants, Minnie and Ester, have now overtaken Dawn so tonight I took the opportunity to get them off the ground onto a wooden board with a couple of old compost bags between. This extra padding will stop stones puncturing the flesh and allowing rot to get in. I could just about lift them to do this so not a moment too soon. Whether they will be as big as Heidi last year at 262lbs only time will tell but the daily growth is noticeable. It was this time last year that Heidi really took off so we shall see. I am leaving a couple of grapefruit sized fruits on each plant at any one time to act as 'buffers'.


The idea is that these smaller fruits stop all the sap going into the big fruit, as too much 'pressure' can cause them to burst open. However, you don't want these buffer fruit to grow too big and take too much away from the one you intend to show. I cut these smaller fruits before they get to football size so it's a bit of a balancing act.

Preparation is key

So, the countdown to show season has begun. Many shows have already taken place but the main season is from late August through September. After all your hard work the crunch time will soon be upon you and there's very little you can do now to change the way your stuff is growing. But there are things you can do to change the way it looks on the benches. It's worth taking time tying and trimming your onions. A nice neat raffia tie can make ordinary onions and shallots look better than they are. Acquaint yourself with your show's rules so that you know exactly what is expected and don't make last minute mistakes. If in any doubt ask someone who knows. And remember size really isn't everything. Concentrate on uniformity and quality.

Think about how and when you're going to harvest your stuff. It's no use getting up on show day and doing it then. Potatoes can be washed up to a couple of nights before and stored dry in some kitchen towelling in the dark...say a biscuit tin. I pull my beetroot 2 days before and soak in buckets of water after cleaning. Runner beans can be picked up to 5 or 6 days before once they reach the length you need. Store against a wooden batten in damp cloths in a cool dark place. Carrots and parsnips should be pulled the day before, cleaned and wrapped in cloths (wet for carrots and dry for parsnips) and boxed up ready for loading. On the day of the show you just want to load everything up and go, using tick lists to make sure you have all your show paraphernalia such as Top Tray boards, scissors, dishes of sand for shallots, paper plates and so forth. Sit down with your schedule a week before the show and work out exactly what you will need and get it all together, preferably in a box.

Tonight I visited Burbage Show to see what my fellow local competitors are benching and to catch up with old friends. It was a very good show but I'm not being big headed when I say I would have walked off with a fair few red cards I reckon. However, my new best friend Ian Taylor won best in show with a cracking plate of Winston that put my scabby specimens to shame. One point of concern for me was that I noticed there were quite a few rough specimens of Sweet Candle. Skin finish has never been a problem for me so I hope my own roots don't look like that.

I also had a chat with Mark Roberts who won the collection of 6 at the NVS National in 2007 held at Malvern. It was a superb display that made me goggle-eyed, his celery in particular being truly exceptional. He's had a bad year or two but is hoping to return with a vengeance next season. Nice fella and I hope to be visiting his garden in the Spring to pick up some more top tips.

Footy's back!

Had a visit to the Smithyveg estate Thursday evening from Paul Bastow (no jokes please, the guy's had enough misery in life having a name like that and living in Yorkshire.....see link on right to his blog). It was good to be able to advise a fellow grower with a few tips for his upcoming local show and I'm sure from his undoubted enthusiasm we'll be seeing his name in the cards at a much higher level in the not too distant future. Just a pity he's a Yorkshireman and from a Leeds United supporter's loins but hey ho. The plastic white rose of Yorkshire that he presented me with has come in very useful as a beer mat for my tea mug! Man U have always been on top!

With that in mind the Premiership season starts again today. I'm pretty sure the super reds will triumph again if we can have less injuries than last season and Rooney starts playing properly again. Bit worried about Liverpool now that that Spanish joke has gone and they've made a couple of decent signings in the close season.....a Japanese midfielder called Nikamota and the Italian defender Robatelli.

Bean better

I went to town on my runner bean supports this year, using strong wooden supports and washing line cord to make sure there was no way the fence could collapse as has happened to me the last couple of seasons. However, I only had a dozen or so beans germinate meaning that I have huge gaps in the row and it all looks a bit silly. The variety is Blyton Sabre and I think the problem is that the seeds are just so large they take up so much water and rot before the first leaves and roots can escape the seed casing.


I must say though that I do have some wonderful looking beans, up to 20" long and showing no bean bulge. This weekend I shall take off all beans larger than 2 or 3 inches long. These should then be perfect size for my first shows in a couple of weeks time.

Blyton Sabre isn't commercially available but some seeds were given to me by Les Stothard the raiser of the Blyton Belle Marrow. He went to great pains to tell me not to thin the trusses under any circumstances as the beans will simply be too long if I did that. I can believe it.

The demise of Dawn

Popped up the allotment tonight and the pumpkin I named Dawn appears to have stopped growing which is a shame. However, the good news is that I have even bigger pumpkins now on my other two plants which were only grapefruit size a couple of nights ago. I have named these two Ester (Hall....see BT ads) and Minnie (Driver). They are on much bigger plants so should now have plenty of fuel to grow big very fast.

I got all my Vento onions for the 250g class up a couple of nights ago. A very mixed bag but I managed to salvage a dozen or so at about 7-8oz. After stripping back all split skins you should be left with an unsplit green skin. If it's brown take this skin off also. I have changed my method of storing this year. After washing and drying I am merely wrapping each bulb in a sheet of newspaper rather than leaving them to stand on beds of sawdust. Apparently, a top showman I heard of used to do this so I'm giving it a try.

Hopefully my wife has now lost interest with this post if she started reading it.....I shall be storing them somewhere in the house for more constant temperatures. Last year I had some skin markings on my ripened bulbs which I put down to condensation from being stored in the garage.

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.

The NVS is 50 !

http://www.nvsuk.org.uk/







This year the NVS is celebrating it's 50th year and a special DVD has been produced free to all members. You also get a glossy magazine every quarter which I think is on a par with Kitchen Garden and will only get better. I've already had one letter published and have been told I have another one that will be in the October issue on the subject of starting your own show. I shall also be penning a piece on my little wager with NVS National Secretary Dave Thornton. If I beat him (highly unlikely) it will be a long chapter but if I lose (very likely at this point in time) it will be a paragraph. In code. And invisible ink!



Membership of the NVS costs £14 for individuals but is going up to £17 next year, but I would still thoroughly recommend it. The magazines alone are worth that and you also get the chance to attend talks run by local district associations. With this in mind I'm hoping to form a Leicestershire DA so that I don't have so far to travel to my nearest one. Dave Thornton and the great collection grower John Branham have already offered to do talks if I can get it off the ground. The only problem is that Leicestershire currently only has about 10 members so I shall be trying to recruit new members at the upcoming shows by leaving some posters lying around the benches.



In the meantime try and get along to an NVS show and marvel at the quality of the veg on display. The Southern branch championships held as part of the New Forest Show has already been and gone but there is still the Welsh, the Northern (17th to 19th at Harrogate) and the Midlands (at Malvern). The 'biggie' is the National held at Dundee on the 3rd to the 5th September. There are sure to be some good exhibits this special year and I wish I could attend but alas I am committed to other shows.

Burying my sorrows in Dawn!

I shall try and take my mind off the spud disaster today by popping up the allotment to see how Dawn is getting on. You should start to see daily differences to the size of your pumpkin now.

And if you thought my pumpkin Heidi last year was big (262lbs) take a look at how Simon (cool name!) McMinnis's is getting on by clicking on his grower's diary below. Growing in a polytunnel helps admittedly, but 400+lbs already is still going some.


http://www.bigpumpkins.com/Diary/DiaryView.asp?season=2010&grower=51148&action=L

Disaster!

Never mind the global economic crisis, the floods in Pakistan or Wayne Rooney playing like Simon Smith.....this is a real disaster. I had this afternoon off and as it was raining I decided to empty out my 22 bags of Winston spuds. What a huge disappointment.

As you can see from the photos they have got more scabs on them than a whore's septum. I knew I was in trouble as soon as I emptied the first bag as the compost was just too dry. I barely managed to scrape together a few plates for showing at local level. The better ones came from the few bags that were reasonably moist. Getting a plate good enough to show at Malvern is out of the question. Some of the surface blemishes may rub off but they won't look great, but at local level they may well get me the odd place card if I can clean them up to a respectable level. The problem is they'll need quite a bit of vigorous scrubbing to get them looking half decent which is ok for a one day show. After two days they'll start to resemble a plate of badly bruised bollocks.

I think the problem is that Winston is such a beast of a potato, growing so vigorously and quickly it just literally sucks the moisture out the compost. Coupled with the heat of May and June and lack of any rain to note it has been impossible to get enough water into the bags. It even caused a lot of the tubers to split so we'll have to eat these first.

As usual, I had a few monsters despite leaving every single shoot on the seed tubers.

So, I have a large sack full of spuds for the kitchen. They may not be good enough to show but they'll be perfectly edible. A lot of people reckon Winston is tasteless but I love it roasted. Bloody good job really!

I'm hoping this is purely a problem with this variety. I had the same problem with the Winston that I grew for the early show a few weeks ago. Thankfully, the Kestrel seemed to stand up to the heat and water shortage a lot better so I'm hoping the same is going to be true of the rest of my varieties. I have about 50 bags to harvest in the coming weeks so I hope I haven't wasted all that effort. If so I'm going to be exhausting my vocabulary of swear words and will be looking for some new ones.

Salad days!

Strange things are a-happening! I sowed this batch of Pablo beet with a view to pulling the whole lot up for Malvern, exactly 15 weeks from the show date. However, the majority of them have reached size in a matter of a few short weeks. And this is a variety that I have struggled to get more than golf ball size in the past! The old water tank was filled with sieved compost in order to be able to pull beet with a nice long single tap root. Looks like my local shows are going to have to suffice as I'm sure they won't hold until the end of September.





I've not shown my parsnips on here for a while after growing a little disillusioned with them early on. However, I must say the foliage has really grown well in the last few weeks and I could be in for a few decent sets. I can't see any evidence of yellow spot (canker) so fingers crossed. I had a few stations non-germinate so resowed with another variety. I made sure I marked these ones with a label so I don't get them mixed up when pulling.





And remember the mystery veg correctly guessed by Dan? It has gone absolutely bozwonk. Mexican sour gherkins, mouse melons, sour cucumber.....call them what you will but this bizarre crop is growing out of control and throwing up dozens of tiny little fruits. It's a nice crunchy sour cucumber taste and a welcome change in salads. I should have plenty of these to fill the gaps in my trug displays.

Fiddle-de-di!

Or to put it another way......f************************************ck!

I thought I'd got on top of onion white rot but my 3 biggest onions succumbed to it yesterday. It really is heart breaking and I'm going to have to make some decisions later this year. I think I shall have to resort to growing it in large pots filled with bought-in sterilised top soil and added nutrients. An expensive option but I appear to have little choice. I shall not be exhibiting any big onions this season.

At times like this you need to focus on the good stuff, and my Sweet Candle stumps certainly fall into that category. The photo below doesn't do them justice as they are absolutely huge at the top, several inches around. If they carry their weight all the way down I can't wait to see what they look like. I hope they're not too big although I think they will not swell out much more but will now be starting to form the stump end and will need to make sure they don't force themselves upwards and out of the sand as a result.

I have no way of knowing as yet but I hope to have some decent Winston spuds in the bags. These are in my garage having had the tops cut down a few days ago. I shall be emptying them out and putting them into sets in a week or so. You need to give them at least 7 days for the skins to harden. However, a sneaky fondle deep within the peat of a few bags has told me I have several good sized tubers to look forward to. I just hope I won't suffer from too much scabby skins which rendered my early plantings for the July show at Keyworth unshowable.

Meanwhile the rest of my spuds (Kestrel, Maxine,Blue Belle, Camelot and Harmony) have plenty of fresh looking green tops on them and will be another 2 or 3 weeks before I can get these up in the same manner.

Introducing Dawn

Popped up the allotment tonight to see how the pumpkins are faring. Bred from the seed of last year's "Heidi", they've grown a lot since I went on holiday, spreading a good 20'x4' each.




There are quite a few cricket ball sized fruits on the nearest and furthest plants but......in amongst the foliage of the middle plant was this football sized one. Checking back on last year's blog entries Heidi wasn't this big until about the 11th so fingers crossed I may even get a bigger one this year. I have named it Dawn (after Dawn Steele).

Marrow escape.

History is littered with things that people should have said, often with terrible consequences for not having said it. Things like:

"Get your head down Sire, that clumsy twat is going to have some f*cker's eye out". King Harold's body guard 1066.

"You did turn the gas off didn't you". Mrs Farriner, Pudding Lane, London 1666

"That sure is one butt-ugly baby. I think it'll be best for everyone if I flush it down the loo?" Twice, at least, to my knowledge...Mrs. Hitler's physician, Austria 1889 and Mrs. Unsworth's midwife, Lancashire 1970.

"You know we really shouldn't be going this fast with all those big white floaty things around us". First mate, Titanic, somewhere in the Atlantic 1912.

"Jeeeeesus. That french fella can sure knock the sherberts back can't he!" Mohammed Al-Fayed Ritz Hotel, Paris 1997

"Are we all absolutely sure about this? My sources tell me this Benitez fella doesn't have the first f*cking clue!" Silent Anfield board member 2004.

Add to these if you will...... "Heather, make sure you harvest the courgettes whilst i'm away before they get too big".