SUPERSIZE YOUR VEGE
Who says size doesn't matter? Not these record-breaking Welsh vegetable growers. Lynda Hallinan meets them on their home turf to find out how they grow such whopping crops.
They are one of the horticultural hazards of summer: courgettes that puff themselves up to the size of sausage dogs while you are off holidaying at the beach. Who hasn’t come home from their Christmas break to find at least one marrow as big as a caveman’s club? But whereas I sigh at the size of these chubby courgettes, Welsh champion vegetable grower Kevin Fortey actively encourages his marrows to reach massive proportions. He panders to their every whim, lavishing sheep dag compost on their soil and tucking their tummies on sand beds under umbrellas in a bid to break records.
I visited him in late August, taking a tour of the tunnelhouses and beds behind his mum Marjorie’s house in an unassuming suburban Cwmbran street. This is where Kevin and his brother Gareth grow prize-winning produce along with Kevin’s son Jamie Courtney-Fortey, a record-breaking sunflower grower in his own right. Jamie holds the UK record for the largest sunflower head, an enormous beauty that measured 66.54cm across and 170.2cm in circumference.
Kevin reels off some of his recent triumphs: the UK record for the heaviest marrow (77.6kg), the biggest bell pepper (560g), the weightiest field pumpkin (72kg) and the world’s heaviest chilli (348g). Meanwhile just up the road in Langstone, their rival Ian Neale holds the world record for the biggest celery plant (34kg), the longest cucumber (107cm) and the heaviest swede in the world, weighing in at 53.9kg.
South Wales is an unlikely place to find a cluster of competitive croppers, but the genesis of the UK National Giant Vegetable Championship can be traced here to a “bet over a pint at the local pub” in the early 1980s.
Kevin and Gareth’s late father Mike challenged fellow punters at his pub to a competition to see who could grow the biggest pumpkins in their allotments. “After two years, the pumpkins had gotten too big to fit through the doors of the pub, so they had to find a new venue for their competition,” Kevin recalls.
They relocated to the workingmen’s club (“it had double front doors”) and then to a leisure centre in Cardiff. And now there’s an entire autumn championship circuit, with hotly contested shows in Peterborough, Aberglasney, Harrogate and Malvern.
“It’s really fun,” says Kevin of his horticultural hobby. “Some people go to the pub to down ten pints a night but I prefer to potter around in the greenhouse trying to get something to grow as big as possible.”
By day, Kevin has a job managing social housing grants, but when he clocks off, you’ll find him either tending his crops at his mum’s house or down at his Cwmbran allotment. (Kevin’s partner Emma “tolerates” his passion but has declared their own manicured garden a no-go zone for the growing of giant veges.)
There’s no rest for the wickedly obsessed, as growing giant veges for glory requires year-round dedication. For Kevin, the season begins in late winter, when he cultivates the soil floor of his tunnelhouse and takes a strimmer to his green cover crops outdoors. He sows nitrogen-fixing field beans and hairy vetch, and brown mustard for its biofumigant properties, for nothing wrecks your championship chances quite like a soil-borne fungal disease.
After the green crops are mulched to a pulp and dug in with a rotary hoe, he gets his soil analysed. Any deficiencies are corrected with trace elements and NPK fertiliser.
Inside his hothouse he starts his leeks off in October, his cabbages in November, and his giant carrots and parsnips in January. But it is the marrows that take the most time.
In May/June, Kevin chits his marrow seeds on a wet paper towel inside a sealed plastic container. “As
“You must have very strong arms," I say to Kevin as he poses with a 70kg marrow. “Well, I still can't do chin ups," he quips.
soon as I see the tap root emerging out of the seed, the seeds are sown in white pots inside a heated ropagator.”
Why white, I ask, given that most plant seedlings are sold in black plastic punnets and pots? “It reduces the heat getting to the root system, so they grow more slowly, producing stronger, healthier roots.”
The marrow seedlings are planted, along with a scoop of beneficial mycorrhizal fungus, when all risk of frost has passed. A mini tunnel is popped over the plants for the first few weeks after transplanting to keep them sheltered from cold winds.
Because he’s maintaining the seed line started by his dad Mike 25 years ago, hand-pollinating the flowers and only saving seed of the biggest fruit, no other edible marrows or courgettes are grown in the garden to avoid any risk of cross pollination. And just to be sure, after pollination the female (fruit-producing) flower is covered with a paper bag secured with a rubber band for 48 hours.
Each plant is allowed to grow to about 4.5m long, with a single fruit set on the main vine. All of the side shoots grow out 1.5m before being nipped off. To stabilise the plant and allow for as much growth as possible, Kevin snuggles the main and side vines into the soil so they can root down at all the leaf joints.
Only one marrow is left to develop per vine, first in a bed of soft sand, so its progress isn’t slowed by bumps or lumps in the soil, and then on top of a reflective polystyrene board that helps insulate it from fluctuations in soil temperature.
It’s a nerve-racking time and Kevin keeps a constant eye on the weather forecast. If the marrow splits because
Looks can be deceiving with root veges. “You never know what you're going to get until you pull them up. They can have huge tops but not much underneath."
of too much rain or too much heat, the entire season is lost. “So far, we’ve been lucky in that we’ve always managed to save at least one,” says Kevin.
His aim is to crack the world record for the heaviest marrow, which currently stands at 208lb or 94.34kg. “That one was grown in the Netherlands. It was just luck, a fluke, because they’ve never had them that big again. We’ve come close, at 195lb (88.45kg), but then it split.”
While Kevin’s runner beans produce flaming orange flowers as big as sweet peas and pods that regularly reach more than 70cm in length, that’s still a full foot short of the world record of 1.3m. “The world record is actually quite contentious,” Kevin says. “It was set in 1997 in America but we suspect it was a yard long bean, rather than a standard runner.”
Championship vegetable growers share a collegial spirit and Kevin has enjoyed a friendly rivalry with Ian Neale since he was a lad competing alongside his dad. But don’t be fooled into thinking that makes them any less competitive. “It was quite funny this year at the Malvern show when we weighed in our poblano chillies. Ian’s looked bigger but when we plonked ours on the scales it was 48g heavier and took out the world record. He wasn’t too happy about it. I can’t repeat exactly what he said to me,” teases Kevin, “but it wasn’t congratulations.”
Ian, 74, is a retired nurseryman who used to grow popular bedding and hanging basket plants, such as busy lizzies, begonias, alyssum and antirrhinums, plus a Christmas cut flower crop of chrysanthemums.
Ian still grows on a few flowers for the local council’s colourful roadside planter boxes, and for his sister Joan, who lives next door and has a riotous begonia-filled backyard. Joan has a soft spot for wallflowers, which explains why there are a few rows of them tucked in between Ian’s giant marrows and cabbages when I visit. “I’ve always loved growing plants and giant vegetables fitted in really nicely as a side hobby. I wasn’t keen on golf or bowls and I used to play rugby but once I had the nursery, I couldn’t afford to get injured.”
And what do they do with their humongous swedes and colossal carrots after the prizes are awarded? Kevin hires his giant vegetables out as props for PR events and film sets – two of his leeks once flew first class to Japan for a special television appearance – but Ian is happy for his root vegetables to take a one-way trip to each competition.
“My car is quite weighed down by the time I’ve squeezed in a 100lb marrow, an 80lb swede, a 30lb beet, a 50lb cabbage and a couple of giant cucumbers. So if I’m driving 180 miles to a show, I’d rather leave them behind for them to deal with so I can get home that much quicker.”
Some of their crops do end up on a plate or in a glass. “Although most giant vege isn’t great to eat,” explains Kevin, “some – like the runner beans, tomatoes and onions – are perfectly good. Even the giant carrots are okay, though they do take a bit of cutting to get them into the slow cooker.”
Ian gifts his watermelons to a local fellow who ferments them into a fizzy wine but he lives alone and admits that he doesn’t have the appetite to chew through an entire 54kg swede. “I have eaten them – or at least pieces of them,” he jokes.