Update

This is where all my show veg and flowers are at thus far in the season, bearing in mind that it's still very early.

Tomato Cederico. 1st 8 seedlings recently potted on in conservatory. Another batch will be sown this weekend to cover the later shows.

Celery Morning Star. Tray pricked out a week ago and first true leaves now showing. These are also in my conservatory as it's been far too cold to put them in the greenhouse recently.

Peppers Bullhorn have just germinated in the conservatory, likewise my aubergines Black Beauty.

Large onions (bought-in plants) in greenhouse and will be planted into greenhouse borders next weekend.

Blanch leeks (also bought in) have been potted on into larger pots and a 4" pipe lagging collar applied. These are in the greenhouse and will be planted outside during mid to late April.

Shallots were planted during January in 3" pots in the greenhouse and now have decent roots and foliage. I will pot these on into 5"-6" pots where they will stay, being 'plunged' into the outside onion borders in the next couple of weeks.

Onion sets Stuttgarter Stanfield. Were planted in cell trays in the greenhouse several weeks ago and are very slow to show green leaves.

Red Baron onions. 2 trays pricked out a week ago. Greenhouse.

Parsnips Pinnacle. Chitted seeds have been placed in each 'station' in my large drums, 35 stations in all. The nights have been very cold however so I will have a nervous week or two waiting to see if they have survived.

Red cabbage Maestro. Tray of 24 pricked out 2 weeks ago. Greenhouse.

Green cabbage Globemaster. Tray of 24 pricked out yesterday. Greenhouse.

Brussel Abacus. Tray of 24 pricked out 2 weeks ago. Greenhouse.

My long carrots will hopefully get sown next weekend.
My potatoes (Winston/Kestrel/Nadine/Malin) are chitting in trays in my garage and will go in the weekend after that.
My dahlia tubers are all in boxes of peat and will be watered for the first time tomorrow to encourage new shoots for cuttings.

Manchester United 3 Liverscum 0

Can anyone tell me if he was playing? I certainly never noticed him!

Onions and leeks are go!

Apologies to Liam (http://veg4show.blogspot.com/) for nicking his photo but it shows brilliantly how to support onions during growth. They need to be kept bolt upright so that they grow symmetrically and he uses plastic clips and small canes to create a cage. It's little tricks like this that make the difference between 1st and 2nd come Show day! His onions look superb for the time of year so I'll be interested to know how he gets on.





I only collected my large onions and leeks (20 of each) from a local grower today, and immediately potted the leeks on into 1 litre square pots with a 4" pipe lagging collar as a starter. The onions are still quite small (not like Liam's) so they have a lot of growth to make up but there is plenty of time.





I've also acquired some new parsnip seed today (Pinnacle, a new F1 variety) which I've put onto some moistened kitchen towelling in a tray on my kitchen windowsill. As soon as the white root radicle pops out of the seed casing I will transfer a couple of seeds to each prepared parsnip station. That way I can save 4 or 5 weeks of waiting around wondering if they've germinated when sown directly outside. Grown this way the seeds should be showing root inside a week if kept uniformly warm and moist.

Are you 'bored' yet?

It's was a weekend of highs and lows. Obviously it started with Manchester United being robbed of their rightful place in the semi-final of the FA Cup by an FA/referee conspiracy. Luckily it's only a Mickey Mouse cup and we have bigger fish to fry...........and Arsenal only managing a draw on Sunday at Wigan has cheered me up no end.

I bored and filled all but 2 of my 35 parsnip holes on Sunday with a variation on Dave Thornton's mix.

He recommends:

45L compost

15L vermiculite

10L sand

10L soil

6oz Vitax Q4

3oz Ground lime stone
3oz seaweed meal

I cannot get Vitax Q4 so instead of the last three ingredients I've added 6oz each of superphosphate, potash, lime and calcified seaweed, and 3oz of bone meal. This is a lot weaker mix than I've used in previous seasons and I made sure it was all well mixed by doing it three equal lots.

I've never used vermiculite in my mixes before thinking it an unnecessary expense but now I can see it has definite advantages. It certainly makes the mix more free-draining and should help to encourage roots to go down into the bore hole. The packet also claims that vermiculite helps to lock up the nutrients until they are required. We shall see.

Having said all that when I came to sow my seed I couldn't find the packet anywhere. I know I've had it so I must have misplaced it somewhere in the garage or house and I've had to send off for another packet. What a git I am!

Start sowing

At last I've managed to get the first of my seeds sown. Today I did some red cabbage (Maestro), brussel sprout (Abacus), red onion (Red Baron) and onion (Bristol). These are all in the cold greenhouse along with a pot of parsley which is needed for the enhancement of displays and baskets.

Inside I've sown a pot of Morning Star celery which, along with cauliflowers, is one of the two crops I really want to improve on this year as I've never really been able to show either to a high standard. Celery needs quite a long growing season so I've sown some seed onto some moistened compost in a pot and covered them over with vermiculite. They'll be kept warm to aid germination and should be ready for pricking out in a month or so. At that point I'll transfer them to the greenhouse by which time temperatures should have warmed up. However, I will have to keep an eye on night time weather forecasts as celery is very susceptible to frost or even low temperatures and will die very easily if allowed to get too cold.

I'll remember that!

More than 24 hours have gone by and Pakistan still hasn't started an earthquake disaster fund for us! I say next time they have one they can get stuffed!

Imagination and schedule makers

Every year when the schedules pop through your letter box you invariably find that the same old classes are churned out with few, if any changes. I believe the key to keeping good shows going is down to changing things every year and introducing new classes that mix things up a bit. At Sutton Bonington we try and alter the schedule each year by getting rid of those classes that haven't been well supported for a few years and replacing them with quirky new ones if possible. One class we've had for 3 or 4 years now is a class for runner beans/tomatoes and round beetroot (2 of each) and it's always been well-supported. The key is that just about everyone grows all of these crops and it's usually quite easy to find a matching pair.

Plonker!

ARSENE WENGER called for Martin Taylor to be banned for life after the defender broke Eduardo's leg at St Andrew's. Wenger demanded the ultimate punishment after discovering Eduardo is likely to miss the start of NEXT season.
The Gunners boss fumed: "This guy should never play football again. What is he doing on the football pitch?
"But it’s like a guy who kills one time in his life. It’s enough and you have a dead person.
"This tackle is absolutely horrendous. If you watch it again, you can’t say the guy has played the ball. It is not acceptable.
"I've gone along with the idea for a long time that to stop Arsenal, you have to kick Arsenal.
"I knew that an injury like this had been coming for a long time now.
"We have escaped a few horrendous tackles since the beginning of this season and I knew something like this could occur sometime."


YOU Two-faced French prat. What about last week when your players were trying to break more skilful Man Utd players in half simply because we were wupping your asses? 70-odd red cards since you took charge at Arsenal tells a story!

Drums on raised sand bed

Further to yesterday's post I think it's important to show this picture. My plastic drums have the bottoms cut out so in effect they're just big tubes. If I just stood the drums straight onto the ground it would be impossible to get them to stand straight so I have metal frames about 12" high which are also filled with sand. The drums are stood on this sand so that it's an easy job to get them to stand up straight with the use of a spirit level. The sand in the metal frames means I can also get an extra 12" of length in my roots.

Parsnip drums

As mentioned in the previous post I'm growing my parsnips in drums this year. A couple of weeks ago I emptied them all out and refilled them. If you don't do this the sand gets compacted and it's very difficult to bore the holes. There is also a lot of compost from the previous year's bore holes so you are also able to mix this with the sand so that over the years the sand starts to get darker and darker.The first drum is emptied into a large rubble sack, the second drum is empied into the first drum and so on until the sand from the rubble sack is put back into the final drum (see arrows in pic).


As you're doing this every 10 spadefuls or so I sterilise the sand to get rid of any nasties that may be lurking such as various root rot spores or carrot fly eggs. I use a strong solution of Jeyes Fluid or Armillatox. Each drum is filled to 6" or so of the top and then covered with a pane of glass to allow the sand to settle. The pane of glass also stops the cats from doing their business.

This year's red cards?

Right....let's get this blog back on track! I've just got back from a long weekend walking in Scotland so now my thoughts need to turn back to gardening. I've done very little on the garden for several months so I'll need to seriously drag things back in the next few weeks. All of my seeds (see pic) have now arrived and I'm hoping there are plenty of 'red cards' within the magic sachets! But unless I prepare everything (soil/compost mixes/feeds etc) properly in the coming weeks it won't matter a jot how good the seed is so I need to get cracking.

I have a small tray of Tasco onions on the go and my shallots are potted up in the greenhouse, but that is all. I've emptied the sand out of my carrot drums and refilled them as this season I'm going to grow parsnips in them instead, and grow carots in the raised slab beds that I usually grow parsnips in. Don't ask me why......I can't really explain it! Sometimes you just have to go with a hunch.

We wuz all robbed!

Bobby Charlton played with George Best, Denis Law, Booby Moore, Jimmy Greaves, Tom Finney and Nat Lofthouse. He played against Pele, Puskas, Di Stefano, Beckenbauer and Eusebio. He saw Cruyff, Maradona, Zidane and more recently Henry and Ronaldo. But he says Big Dunc was the best of them all.

6th February 1958.

Baldy's going to be in print!

I've been accepted as one of the guinea pigs for a monthly section in Garden News about people who 'grow for show', the idea being to try and get people to enter at least one thing in their local show in 2008.

I hope people don't read it after eating.....my face is enough to bring anyone's breakfast back up! And I guess from now on I'll have to watch my p's and q's and become an all round much nicer human being! I've already joined the National Society for the Prevention of Slug Death and shall soon be donating to the Old Folk's home for Retired Traffic Wardens....bless 'em!

A challenge for 2008

I've had the following email from the editor of the Garden News

Dear Simon,

I hope you don't mind me contacting you out of the blue, but I still have your email address from last year when you got in touch and introduced me to your blog.

I'm planning a sequence of articles for GN this year on growing for showing that I thought you might be interested in. What I really want to do (hopefully!) is encourage people to have a go. I don't know if you're aware that it's GN's 50th anniversary this year, so we thought this would be a good year to challenge our readers to grow at least one thing for their local show and keep the tradition alive!

What I'd really like to do, to show people that you don't need huge greenhouses and masses of specialist equipment (like Medwyn!), is follow some ordinary gardeners who are relatively new to veg showing over the course of the summer. The difficulty is how I find these newcomers, which is when I thought of you! I wondered if there's any chance you could post something on your blog to help me find some willing volunteers, or indeed whether you'd like to be involved? All you & any other volunteers would need to do is chat to me for 5 minutes once a month to tell us how things are going, what you're doing etc. and if possible, supply a couple of pictures of the produce as it grows.

What do you think? If you're happy to get involved, it would be a great opportunity to mention your blog lots as well! By the way, Vanessa Robins, who you originally got in touch with me about - she was the new shower who wanted advice - has just agreed to be one of my volunteers!

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes,

Clare


So.....are any of you out there interested? What about you Kevin?

What a ****ing gooooooal!

Is it possible (or indeed right?) to become sexually aroused by a goal or should I really be keeping such thoughts to myself?