Just in case you were wondering whether our vegetables won any prizes in the village horticultural show – no, they didn’t (notice I have distanced myself by referring to ‘they’ rather than ‘I’ who didn’t win any prizes!). I had actually talked myself out of entering any of the categories as I had learned that there were particular standards of presentation for each category. In the case of the shallots category each shallot has its top bent over and neatly secured with raffia or string and then placed in a little dish of sand. Suddenly it all sounded rather serious and as I haven’t been to a horticultural show before, let alone taken part in one I thought it would be best if just went along to see what it’s all about before I think about putting in anything next year.
Well, that all went out of the window when the evening before one of Thomas’s friends, who is on the committee, asked (read: made me feel like I ought to) if we were putting anything in as there weren’t many entries. So, the morning of the show, feeling obligated and rather excited at the same time, I dash over to the allotment and grab anything that is big and bright and beautiful (see photo) to enter in the ‘housewife’s choice’, as well as a bunch of sweet peas and five different herbs. I ‘arranged’ the herbs and flowers in two liqueur glasses as the stems weren’t long enough for anything larger and used our trug lined with a table cloth for the vegetables. Thomas took it all down to the village hall. I was actually quite pleased with it all at the time. That is, until I went down in the afternoon when the judging had all taken place and the show opened for everyone to see who had entered what, who had won and who had lost. All of the entries looked fabulous. The flowers were arranged beautifully, the chocolate cakes (there are other categories to appeal to a range of skills) were to die for and the vegetables were...not like mine at all. Mine was, shall we say, on the rustic end of the scale, whereas others were arranged in a manner which clearly indicated that they knew how it was supposed to be done, they were somehow more ‘polished’ than mine. I did feel rather foolish. You know, when you turn up to an event wearing jeans and everyone else is smart casual. You’ve got to quickly put on that thick skin and pretend it doesn’t matter. Oh well. It has to be said that mine was the only entry which included a swede, crown prince squash, an enormous red cabbage or curly kale. It must have been a matter of taste!
Loosely on the theme of you win some, you lose some, we planted some baby corn this year, Minipop I think they were called. Baby corn are really expensive to buy so I thought it was a good reason to spend some our allotment space on them. What a waste of time. I planted 12 plants and picked every cob (see photo). No wonder it’s so expensive.
'housewife's choice'