Westminster Bridge

I love this.......In the mornings, these aptly-shaped shadows all point to the West side of the bridge, which is the side of the Houses of Parliament.



If anyone is interested I'm selling the spawn of Heidi on ebay.....rest assured anyone who has asked for some seed.....these will be in the post shortly!


http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Giant-pumpkin-seeds-variety-Heidi-from-the-Sugababes_W0QQitemZ250528501538QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUK_HomeGarden_Garden_PlantsSeedsBulbs_JN?hash=item3a54a98f22"

Sleepers

Surely with a name like Nidal Malik Hasan the yanks saw that one coming? It just goes to show we all have to be vigilant these days.

However, GREAT NEWS. I was speaking to a bloke over the road and got onto the subject of my hobby. Turns out he's very interested and also very rich and he would like to sponsor a huge flower and vegetable show next year with big prize money for all classes. He wants to get as many show growers and their families in one big indoor location at the same time and give us all a treat.

If anyone wants a schedule he can be emailed at Alifatwahbinladen@Aljazeerah.com

Should be a cracking day out!!!

Hallowe'en Heidi

You couldn't pay me to go to America. I hate their TV shows. Their reliance on therapy makes me piss my pants. But I absolutely love the American import that is Hallowe'en. The kids round here love it also and it was for this reason that I was to be found this afternoon carving my beloved 262lb Heidi into the shape of a hideous fiend. My thanks to Dan for the inspiration!

She was a bugger to start with but eventually things started to take shape.

All beautiful women have their ugly side.

Heidi feels peckish. The pumpkin she is eating must be 25lbs.

One final photo with my love interest of the summer!

My youngest daughter Rebecca and her alien friends seemed impressed!!!

Everlasting spuds

I've been experimenting with my spuds to see if I can save them from show to show. It's accepted that you can show things like onions and shallots in many shows, from August through to November and generally they tend to look better as they ripen. Marrows and pumpkins usually last several shows although you would have to take care transporting them. I have shown carrots on two different weekends but you do lose some colour and condition by the 2nd weekend.

I've always felt that spuds can only be shown once but got talking to a guy at Sturton who maintains he uses the same spuds throughout the growing season, by wrapping them individually in dry kitchen towelling after each show and storing them in a fridge. In fact, he pointed to a set at Sturton that had been out of the ground since early August and had been to several shows including Harrogate. By that time (3rd October) it was looking a bit rough at its base but it did manage a 2nd place (behind my fresher looking set). The potato in the photo was one of my winning set of white spuds from Sturton, the variety Winston, that I wrapped up and stored in the fridge. It's now 3 weeks since that show and I think it's looking pretty good and could certainly compete at local village level. I think if it's a single day show you could get away with it, but if the show is any longer than that then the spuds will start to go green quite quickly.

I shall certainly be trying this more and more next season. It will mean I can keep my better spuds for the more important shows and then show these same ones a week or more later at other shows, and also save me time as I won't have to scrub as many.

My best ever crop

T'is my eldest daughter Heather's 21st birthday today and we had 'a bit of a do' last night. She's the one in the middle, with her sisters Jennifer 19(right) and Rebecca 14 (left). I feel old.

Purple Puff

I was really taken when I saw this dahlia at Malvern.....until I saw the name. Being totally and utterly anti-all things remotely Quentin Crisp I can never ever grow this plant. What was the raiser thinking?

Celery rust

T'is a good job I'm not proud and only show my good stuff on this blog. I have many, many failures each season and by far the most pathetic of all my veg this season has been my celery. I only grow 5 plants in order to get a set of 2 for Sturton and did manage to get a 2nd (out of 2....the pair on the right!), but the quality was hopeless. Celery is a bog plant in the wild so it can take as much water as you can throw at it, and needs to be grown in good quality moisture retentive soil with added manure.

All was reasonably well until late August when once again they succumbed to celery rust disease. Within weeks the foliage was devastated and I had to take off the worst affected leaflets to make them reasonably ok to consider showing them. Asking around on the NVS forum I'm told Dithane 945 will combat this but you need to spray BEFORE you have the problem. Of course if the foliage suffers then the size suffers as a result so I didn't have very large specimens either. I've grown Red Star for the past 5 years (it's a Man Utd thing!) but I think I'll have a change next season and try Morning Star which seems to be the favoured variety on the NVS benches.

You didn't.....did you?

Did you really think I wasn't going to comment on Liverpool's calamity keeper being beaten by a deflected shot off a beachball last Saturday? He actually went to save the beachball! Hilarious! Man Utd are playing like idiots and yet we're still top of the league. Even more hilarious!


But none of this is quite as hilarious as our postal workers trying to convince us that carrying around a duffel bag with a few hundred letters and having to lift up a really heavy metal flap every 30 yards means they deserve more money, when our brave boys are fighting Osama Bin Bastard's murdering rag heads in Afghanistan and when the rest of us are doing more for less just to try and keep our jobs you moaning, lazy f*ckwits! I'd love to know the percentage of postal workers who have scouse tendencies.

Langdale layabout

Just got back from a long weekend in the Lakes with friends. Ticked off another 4 'Wainwrights'......Pike O'Blisco (that's me on the summit looking out over the Langdale valley), Crinkle Crags and Bow Fell on an awesome day of clear sunny weather on Saturday and then Dow Crag (I think!) on a shitty, misty, drizzly Sunday.

Now it's time to get down to the important business of getting next year's seed order sorted.

Beat by better beet

I usually pick up a few wins in the beetroot class but have only managed a couple of 2nds and a 3rd this season. Admittedly I didn't give them as much care and attention as I usually do, not thinning them out after germination, but I am usually able to clean up a reasonably matched set by scouring the corkiness from the shoulders. However, this year it wasn't to be and the quality of the round beet at Malvern made me realise I must up my game. The fact that the winning beet at Malvern were so obviously illegally oiled with something is neither here nor there! That's one for the conscience of the exhibitor!

Next season I plan to have ready some raised wooden beds made from 12" planks filled with good quality compost. This should allow me to tend to them better and be more easily able to draw compost over the shoulders to help prevent corky skin. I shall probably grow a whole raised bed like this purely with Malvern in mind. Most of the top growers grow Pablo these days instead of Red Ace. I tried Pablo a couple of seasons back and didn't get on with it. I may have to have another shot at it.

Storing 8oz onions

Whilst I've nailed the size and shape of my 8oz onions by measuring them regularly and pulling as soon as they get up to size, I suffered with some strange markings this season. They are a mixture of little black speckles and what look like tide marks and I think it's down to storing them in my garage. I'm sure the change in temperature between night and day causes condensation which affects the skin condition. I think I need to guarantee a more constant temperature to ensure more even ripening. At this point my wife no longer needs to read any further.

Next year I'm storing them in our bedroom!!!

Better quality shallots

Earlier this year I managed to get 12 of National Champion Dave Thornton's shallots (He fought like a bugger but I managed to get them off him eventually).

I grew them on this season alongside my own retained stock and the difference between them was quite striking. Whilst my own 'seed' actually grew bigger the shape was all over the place, so I have now totally discarded these to the kitchen pot.

I now have about 30 bulbs from the Thornton strain for replanting next season. The best of these have bought me 5 wins in the shallot classes this season (including this one at Sturton last weekend), which is amazing considering that prior to that I'd only ever won a total of 9 shows with shallots in 13 previous years. I didn't get them to grow huge, but they were classically 'flask' shaped with nice flat bottoms. Next season I will give them a more favourable planting position alongside one of my raised onions beds in the hope of getting bigger specimens.

The year of the fly!

There is a school of thought that says carrot fly can only fly about 18" off the ground. People who reckon that are about as deranged as Rafa Beneathus when he says Liverscum are going to win the Premiership (sorry Mark the Ciderman!).

I've always had the odd mark but this year has been my worst ever. As you can probably see from my Sturton set above I had it quite badly, which obviously prevents me from showing at the highest level, which is annoying as otherwise I had some fair sized and decent shaped carrots this season. Part of my problem was that I didn't scatter some of my highly toxic (and probably banned!) insecticide around the crowns during the weeks when I was bravely fighting death due to swine flu!

But really I need to be making sure the fly have no way of getting to them by erecting some form of physical barrier and to this end I have bought some enviromesh to cover my long carrots/stump carrots and parsnips. I shall spend the Winter months wisely by mackling together some form of wooden cover to go around my drums and beds to which I will staple the mesh. Hopefully, I won't then have to rely on my insecticides so much. Organic shock horror! I must be going soft!

In the meantime I have given the sand a bloody good drenching with some cheap bleach in order to kill off any eggs. Phew.....he's back!

Now all I have to do is to get my seed and I've been promised some top notch stuff from an unbeatable Scottish grower who shall of course be nameless, but whose wife is absolutely hopeless at growing spuds!

You've got to be shitting me?!?

Not veg related but this is starting to annoy me. One of the photography classes at Sturton was entitled 'Green Interest'. Of course there is a wide subject matter for such a title, and both myself and Leesa entered with brilliant photos, especially mine which was truly great. Anyway, the winner was this doctored piece of 'Okay yah' claptrap, a black and white photo which had a tiny piece of it digitally altered to green. Oh for f*ck's sake! The same thing happened last year. Am I mistaken in thinking that you click a button on your camera, you have the resulting shot developed (or downloaded these days!) and voila....THAT is a tossing photograph. To me a photograph is the same as what you shot. Did this person say to his daughter '"right darling, can you just turn black and white for a minute but you can leave your toy green". Photographists are such a bunch of pretentious knob jockeys.

Free seeds anyone?

I split open my best shaped Blyton Belle marrow today. It formed part of my equal fourth placed set at the Midland NVS Championships at Malvern (if the prize cards went down to 5th as they do in the National I have no doubt they would have come equal sixth!!!). Anyway, I have now extracted all the seeds and have a load to give away. If anyone would like half a dozen drop me a line and I'll post them to you. I already have one or two that I have promised some seeds to.

The marrow on the right is Blyton Motley. I'm not too sure about this one as it's a little too similar to Belle, although at Sturton Les Stothard reckoned I should persevere with it.

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