Go big or go home
Size and straightness matter when it comes to displaying your vegetables at the annual show, discovers Steven Desmond
Size and straightness matter when it comes to displaying your vegetables —and winning—at the annual show, explains Steven Desmond
Everyone who has ever admired a winning entry at a vegetable show has, before too long, overheard a voice somewhere nearby assert that they have better at home. Idle talk, of course, and unworthy, but there must always be people who look at the exhibits and wonder what they would have to do to get among the prizes.
In the past, the fraternity of prizewinners always appeared to emanate a conspiracy of silence, as if the secrets of victory could only be divined by the members of a shadowy inner circle. If there ever was any truth in that notion, it has since vanished like the morning dew in the modern spirit of sharing valuable knowledge.
‘Your evenings will be consumed with seed selection and soil improvement’
The first step to inevitable victory is a visit to your local vegetable show. Walk quietly along the benches and admire the winning entries. Compare them with the legion of non-winners and it will be obvious why at least some of them didn’t triumph. Some are entirely the wrong vegetable, others are the wrong number of specimens, others are all uneven sizes or rather mucky, and so on.
So far, the judging is easy. However, some are handsome, regular, uniform, neatly set out and apparently prizeworthy, yet no coloured card stands by their side. And why has the judge handled some entries so roughly,
snapping them in half or cutting them open with a knife? There is more to this than meets the eye.
Having carried out this simple exercise, you will immediately fall into one of two camps. You will either express polite interest and drift off to some other preoccupation— in which case, I refer you to any other article in this issue—or your mind will begin to race and calculate. If it’s the latter, read on.
Medwyn Williams of Anglesey, a sort of king of vegetable showing, with 11 straight gold medals from Chelsea for his exhibits, has some simple advice for the novice keen to win prizes. Don’t bother, he says, because it’s addictive. Once you win one, you’ll want to win more. Second and third prizes won’t do. Your evenings will be consumed with seed selection, your train journeys with matters of soil improvement and your waking hours with methods of extracting carrots undamaged from the soil.
This is what happened to him, making him a national hero of the exhibition bench, both as grower and judge. He turns up all over the place in either role and is always to the fore encouraging, advising and suggesting improvements to those in whom he detects the vital spark of interest.
Mr Williams’s golden rule is to get the soil into the best condition you can and take it from there. Lay the foundations for success. Be at the end of the garden. It is, after all, a blameless calling. To the beginner faced with the overwhelming choice of what to put in the show, he suggests growing things you like eating. No mystery there. No one should think that this is somehow a constraint, as you would need several lifetimes to grow every available form of lettuce, for example. Better, however, to be good at a few things than mediocre at many.
Let us suppose, then, that you decide to win prizes with your potatoes. There is general agreement that early-season new potatoes taste better than anything you can buy in a shop, so attention turns to the First Earlies section of the catalogue. But, oh dear, there are so many to choose from. Which would taste lovely with some butter on—and go on to win at the show? This is where the advice of the specialist comes in.
I distantly remember my first head gardener growing Home Guard in the stiff clay of the Vale of York and collecting the coveted red card each year at the show. When I moved to a garden with sandy soil in Herefordshire, however, it didn’t do so well, so I tried a few others and found that Pentland Javelin was best suited. And lo, it won prizes on the bench each year. Do your homework and find out by experiment and enquiry which kinds thrive where you live.
Of course, if you’re going to enter, you’ll have to get hold of the show schedule, make your entry and read what it says in the class description. None of it is remotely complicated, but, each year, someone loses out and gets one of those dreaded N.A.S. cards, meaning Not According to Schedule. Six spuds instead of five, red instead of white, that sort of thing.
Then there is that mystery of the show bench. What do the winners know that others don’t? It’s no arcane secret. As Barry Newman of Sussex, senior judge and exhibitor, will tell you, start by looking up the relevant entry in the RHS’S Show Handbook. My ancient and dog-eared copy dates from the era when the specimens before the judge were ranked either Meritorious or Defective. Sonorous though all this is, you will be relieved to hear that the language has moved on. Most of it is common sense. In the case of our potatoes, they should be typical of their kind, similar in appearance to each other and as near blemish-free as you can find.
In practice, this means getting up early on the morning of the show and lifting perhaps three complete plants with your careful fork. Spend a few minutes gently rubbing most of the soil off any promising tubers
and carry them carefully away to a tap and a washing-up bowl. Let them sit in water for a few minutes, then remove the rest of the soil with the utmost delicacy. If you rub too hard, the skin will split—and then comes the silent expletive.
Eventually, you will find you have enough to make up the right number of perfect specimens, plus a few spares as a contingency, so lay them on a damp tea towel in a trug, with another tea towel over the top to keep that precious freshness for as long as possible, and get them to the show bench in good time. There is something vaguely religious in the act of placing them on the bench, then walk away, go home, have a cup of tea and wait.
There is an element of bloody-mindedness about all this, common to anybody who wants to win anything. Scottish vegetable champion Ian Stocks of Stirling, chairman of the Scottish branch of the National Vegetable Society, goes so far as to speculate that there may be something genetic about it. This brings us back to Mr Williams and his concern that, once you start, you’ll be unable to stop.
Inevitably, once the initial prize cards arrive, there is a temptation to try some of the more fiddly-looking classes. One year, I thought I’d have a go at the shallot section as they always look so neat on their little plate of sand. This neatness, as any exhibitor will tell you, is the result of several evenings in front of the telly patiently sorting the perfectly formed from the rest, tidying up the
outer leaves and roots (but not too much) and gradually getting the hang of tying over the tops with raffia, which requires a degree of dexterity. In the event, I came second, which is a sort of purgatory and one that would drive the true zealot on to final victory next time round.
Mr Stocks specialises in root crops, which means he spends a great deal of time carefully detaching the root tips of carrots from the sand underneath the barrels in which they’re grown. The determined leek competitors of north-east England similarly grow their champion plants in raised trenches visible across the allotments of the region.
Then again, the cold light of dawn on the morning of the show will reveal men and women across the country searching through their runner beans to find a dozen fresh, long, un-swollen and almost perfectly straight runner-bean pods from which to pick out six of the best for the bench that morning.
Of all forms of competition, vegetable shows retain one uniquely civilised aspect: although the names of the winners are proudly displayed for all to see, the defeated retain their dignified anonymity. There is honour in having entered and glory for the best. You should have a go.