British Legion Horticultural Show and Chain Mail Article

It was show time again yesterday. It's a shame so many of our fellow plotholders don't fancy the idea of 'showing' or were away. The event sounds so much grander than it is, with sadly only 2 or 3 entries for each of the vegetable categories.

Our Hungerford show is a very local-type show with 'nice', 'normal' looking veg rather than monstrous exhibition vegetables! That's not to say I don't like seeing the monster veg, but I know we'll never go to the efforts of growing it!

So, we entered a few photos and produce for the following vegetable categories:

•  4 White spuds - we got a winner! Jamie's potato-polishing did the trick :-)

•  5 Bush tomatoes - we didn't win. Our tiny toms looked a bit sad wobbling around on a white paper plate!
•  5 Dwarf French beans - a winner. Our first French beans of the year too!
•  Longest runner bean - mine was over 30cm, but the winner was substantially longer!
•  5 Carrots - I think we won this because we left the full leafy tops on
•  Any other vegetable - I had a big yellow Patty Pan squash. Looked pretty and won!
•  Selection of any four veg - Got a 'highly commended' (loser) sticker for my beetroot, colourful chard leaf, purple mangetout and Rondo-carrot. It looked colourful, but Neal's display looked much better.
•  Funny shaped fruit/veg - our mutant Desiree potato won that one for us!

Some of my photos won, but I can't remember which - will post later if I find out.
I was going to put an entry in for chutney but didn't get my act together, so I'll save that for the Hungerford Food Festival next month. There were plenty of jars of pickles and jams though and the flowers were lovely.

We unfortunately couldn't attend the prize-giving and auction so I'm not sure who won best in show. I hope it was a plotholder!

This was our haul of Chopin potatoes from about 5 plants - many more had slug damage
(they're not the winning carrots by the way!)

Oh, and my latest Chain Mail article is here, if you want a little read. 

Chain Mail Article 2

Just a quick link to my second article for the Hungerford Quarterly magazine, Chain Mail.

I pretty much summarise what I've written on the blog over the previous months and try to raise the profile of the allotments within the local community. We need all the help we can get with the short lease still hanging over us.

Anyway, here's a link to the article.

And here's a photo of a hover fly that I took on our wildflower patch on Wednesday - every blog post should have a pic :-)