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The eyes have it

February 7, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Get a room full of keen veg-growers together at this time of year, and sooner or later you can guarantee the talk will turn to whether or not you chit your potatoes.

It’s one of those pieces of wisdom that’s handed down unquestioned from gardener to gardener through the ages: when your seed potatoes arrive, you stand them up in a bright but frost-free place – not too warm though, and out of direct sunlight - with the end with the most ‘eyes’ (little tiny buds) uppermost. This, they say, encourages your spuds to form little sprouts, giving them a head start on the year.

When I first started growing veg I chitted my potatoes religiously every February: that’s what the books told me to do. Then one year I forgot. I couldn’t quite face chucking out a whole years’ worth of tubers, and if I waited another month to chit them it was going to be too late to plant them: so I thought what the hell, I’ll put them in anyway.

Result: bumper crop of spuds and you couldn’t have told the difference. A few years later I did the same thing again under trial conditions. Not quite to RHS standards, you understand, but I did scribble down what I did when and what happened next in a slightly muddy notebook.

I planted two lines of new potatoes next to each other, one chitted for a month from early February, the other planted straight into the ground from the packet. The chitted potatoes appeared above ground much sooner, and grew on more strongly to begin with: but by May the non-chitted spuds had caught up, and by harvest time you couldn’t have told the difference. What’s more, I weighed the crop I got: there was no more than a few ounces in it.

All this has firmly convinced me that you don’t actually need to chit potatoes.

Why, then, have I just painstakingly laid out my lovely selection of new, second-early and maincrop potatoes in eggboxes under the staging in my frost-free greenhouse?

Because if as most gardeners do you buy your seed potatoes a month or more before you’re intending to actually plant them, you’ll quickly discover that they start chitting themselves anyway. If you’re storing them in your shed in a netting bag while they’re doing this, the sprouts tangle themselves up with the netting, grow in all sorts of funny directions and by the time you get around to planting them are so pale and weedy that they snap off the moment you touch the seed potato (if you haven’t already snapped them all off getting them out of the bag, of course). Which is a big waste of potential potato plant if you ask me.

I lay my potatoes out anyway, just as you would if you were chitting them, so that they sprout more normally and are easier to handle come planting time. So in answer to your question: yes, I do chit my potatoes, but no, I don’t.

Posted in Allotments, Greenhouse growing, Storing, sowing | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »

Spud-ilicious!

February 2, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

I don’t know if you’ve ever paused to wonder how many potato varieties there are. Take a guess. Maybe 30? Or 50 if you count all those wierd knobbly heritage varieties?

Well I counted 128 on offer at the 12th annual Hampshire Potato Day, held in Whitchurch, near Andover, at the weekend.

There were French gourmet varieties like ‘Anais’ (first early) and Scottish stalwarts like ‘Kerr’s Pink’ (late maincrop). There were blue ones – ‘Edzell Blue’ (second early) and ‘Salad Blue’ (early maincrop) among others - pink ones (maincrop ‘Pink Fir Apple’)  and red ones: ‘Highland Burgundy Red’ (second early) has a red heart when you cut it open, which is intriguing but slightly unnerving.

There were very modern ones: ‘Sarpo Mira’ and ‘Axona’, maincrops bred in 2002 and 2003, have a deserved reputation for blight resistance; and very, very old ones – late maincrop ‘Fortyfold’ has been grown since 1836. I was very taken with this one as its knobbly tubers are bright purple with white blotches, but since it was bred about five years before blight began ravaging its way through potato growing everywhere (amazing to think there was a time when potato blight didn’t exist) I suspect it would be a martyr to the disease.

And that’s not even counting a number of varieties on display which are so rare there aren’t enough of them to sell, and as well as potatoes…. look, why don’t I stop going on and just let the pictures tell the story.

'Black Bishop Choir Boys' - super-rare and gets my prize for best name of the day

Another old variety so rare it's not sold but handed down through the generations

'Salad Blue', a good-looking Victorian variety which stays blue on cooking

Four double rows of potato crates stretching right across the hall offered a bewildering choice

It wasn't all potatoes though - veg displays and heritage seed merchants were there too

... and peas and beans by the half-pint, as well as onion and shallot sets galore

My haul at the end of the day was 10 tubers each of the maincrops ‘Majestic’ (Scottish, 1911), ‘Mayan Gold’ (yellow-fleshed, 2003), ‘Pentland Squire’ (all-rounder, 1970) and ‘Vitellotte’, a French potato dating back to 1875 which I’m very intrigued by as it’s dark purple, right down to the foliage, and the taste is said to be astonishingly good. I also snaffled some Broad Bean ‘Crimson Flowered’, a Jerusalem artichoke (of which more later) and – my find of the day – a yacon crown, courtesy of the wonderful specialist nursery Edulis.

Potato Days were started by Garden Organic, who still hold the biggest of all of them at Ryton, near Coventry. That’s a bit of a hike from my neck of the woods, so I just went to the nearest one: there’s a list of all the potato days held across the whole country here. They carry on well into March so there’s still plenty of time to go to one near you.

Posted in Shows, Unusual veg | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Blackberry Way

January 30, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Don't be fooled by the twiggy look: blackberries grow into monster plants

A lovely big package arrived on my doorstep the other day, with those magical words “Live Plants” on the side. This never fails to make me go all quivery with anticipation.

Inside was a twig, with some roots on the bottom. Not something to get many people excited, unless they’re fanatical kitchen gardeners and they happen to know this is the bare-root blackberry they ordered a few weeks back, arrived at last.

I have a rather attractive slatted fence my carpenter hubby made, disguising my shed nicely and just begging to have things growing up it. Since this particular patch is a bit on the shady side, it’s ideal for berries, which are among the few fruit which don’t need full sunshine.

Buying bare-root is the only way to go with berry fruit: you get twice as much choice and you pay half the price. It never ceases to amaze me that a plant will quite happily put up with being dug up from its nice cosy home somewhere in, say, Devon, settle into a paper bag and spend a couple of days in the postal system travelling along motorways and doing all the other mysterious things parcels do before arriving on my doorstep, and then after all that spread its roots out in a hole in my back garden and grow like topsy as if nothing had happened.

But that’s how it is, and far be it for me to question it. The only thing that seems to kibosh all that is if you let the roots go for long without planting them back in the ground: three days at most. If you really can’t plant – and with the recent snow I was pretty lucky mine arrived while the ground was thawed – you can plant them temporarily in to a container of compost and plonk that outside while you’re waiting for the ice to melt.

Anyway, so the blackberry now snoozing quietly by my fence is the very nearly thornless ’Ouachita’, bred in Arkansas, growing in Surrey. More prickly, but with, I’m promised, pretty double pink flowers is the other blackberry I’ve put in alongside which is ‘Loch Maree’. The reason I haven’t yet seen the flowers, despite having owned the plant for a year, is that it’s been languishing in a container on my patio: a process which has convinced me that it’s not worth trying to grow blackberries in containers. They just don’t like it – though a smaller variety like ‘Loch Ness’ might have been happier.

So I’ve liberated the ‘Loch Maree’ and it’s now growing on Blackberry Way too – you can just see it at the back in the picture. Later additions I hope will be tayberries and maybe loganberries too. Now all I’ve got to do is get that old 1969 hit by The Move out of my head…

Posted in Fruit | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »

Forcing the issue

January 27, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Forced spuds should be sprouting by mid-February

Still confined to the greenhouse but too soon to sow seeds – what’s a girl to do? I need something to keep me going through the gardening doldrums, so I’ve decided to use a little force.

By which I mean using the relative warmth of the greenhouse to persuade things to get going a bit earlier than they usually would. Permanent crops like rhubarb and seakale are easy-peasy as they live in the soil all winter so warmth for them means spring has arrived – all they need is a bucket over the top and a packing of straw to persuade them to wake up early.

But with a bit more effort and a greenhouse kept just above freezing with a little electric fan-heater, you can also force strawberries – on my to-do list – and potatoes, for which you need no more than a small packet of tubers and a couple of compost sacks.  

This is a great trick for getting very early new potatoes - as long as you get them started by the end of January, you should be harvesting at the beginning of May, a full month before the ones you grow outside are ready.

The first thing to consider is the variety. A super-fast early is usually what’s recommended – ‘Swift’, for example, or ‘Rocket’. But though I’ll admit I’ve never tried growing them myself, I’ve heard they’ve bred out some of the taste in the race for quick maturity.

Though I’d probably get faster results with these types, I want to try a little experiment by choosing ‘International Kidney’, which on paper at least is an early maincrop variety. You’ll probably understand the method in my madness when I tell you that it’s also known as the ‘Jersey Royal’. The flavour should be second to none – yet they should behave just like new potatoes when I harvest them early.

So here’s how you do it:

Place the tubers upright, two to a sack, resting on the surface of the compost

1. If you’re using compost sacks, turn them inside out – this means the black side is facing outwards which absorbs sunshine and keeps it warmer for longer. If you don’t like the allotment aesthetic and can’t hide them away out of sight, you can use the undeniably more attractive purpose-made potato barrel planters or potato sacks.

2. Put your sacks or barrels in place before you fill them – they’ll be far too heavy to move once they’re up and running. Make sure wherever it is that it’s completely frost-free as potato plants are tender. I’ve got mine in a corner of my frost-free greenhouse, but a conservatory would do just as well (as long as you have a very tolerant other half who really, really likes new potatoes). The warmer they are, the quicker they’ll grow.

3. Roll down the top of the compost sack to reduce the height by about two-thirds, and snip some holes in the bottom with scissors to allow drainage. Then fill to about 15cm with multi-purpose compost mixed about 2:1 with a soil-based compost – I used John Innes no. 2.

4. Place your tubers on top of the compost: two per compost sack is plenty, and you don’t have to bother with chitting them as you’re getting them under way so quickly anyway.

5. Now cover them with more of your compost mix so they’re buried by about another 10cm. Water in thoroughly, and keep them damp but not soggy all the time they’re growing.

That’s it! Told you it was easy. I’m looking forward to the first shoots appearing in about three weeks’ time. Once they’ve poked above the surface, the idea is that every time they reach 10cm tall, you roll up the sides of the compost sack a little more and fill to just under the top leaves with more compost. When you get to the top, leave them to flower and then harvest. Now, how’s that for something to look forward to?

Posted in Container veg growing, Greenhouse growing, sowing | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

Introducing some variety

January 21, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Gardeners are incurable optimists. We’ve been through the worst winter in 30 years, the snow has only just departed, and all it’s taken is one little glimpse of sunshine and a degree or two rise in temperature to make me come over all anticipatory about seeds.

I won’t be sowing my first until a week or two’s time: I’ve learned from bitter experience that if you’re too keen all you end up with is leggy seedlings that never quite get going and almost always get overtaken by seeds sown in the warmer, kinder conditions later in spring. Mid-February is the soonest for me, and even then it’s with half an eye on the weather: it may be even later this year as we’ve had such a prolonged cold spell. But you never know: with temperatures now nudging their way above five degrees a few days in a row and eight degrees today….

You see? Incurable.

This year, probably because of diving into a slough of despond and lethargy during those interminably snowy weeks, I’m a bit late with my seed order, which is usually in by December. But that’s not to say I haven’t been turning it over in my head all the while: you see, I’ve been spending all those long, dank, dreary winter evenings drawing up a list of new varieties to try.

It’s easy to get into a rut when you’re growing veg every year: you get to know that ‘Duke of York’ is a good-looking and reliable new potato with fabulous flavour, for example, so you never bother trying the much-praised ‘Kestrel’. I’ve stuck with ‘Gardeners’ Delight’ cherry tomatoes for years – though I know ‘Falcorosso’ is out there too and getting rave reviews.

So my New Year’s Resolution this year (well, one of them) is to get myself out of that rut and Try Something New. It may not work: but I’ll learn something then, too (possibly not to grow that d**n disease-ridden bean ever again, but I’m prepared to take that risk). And I might – just – find some new firm favourites I never would have discovered otherwise.

So here are the highlights from my first seed order of the year – all new varieties I’ve never grown before.

Potatoes: ‘Sharpe’s Express’ (early) and ‘Kestrel’ (mid-season)
Beetroot: ‘Chioggia’
Turnip: ‘Top Cima di Rapa Novantina’
Swiss chard: ‘Costa Verde da Taglio’
Aubergine ‘Violetta’
Borlotti bean ‘Borlotto Lamon’
Shallot ‘Jermor’
Pepper ‘Dulce Italiano’
Red onion ‘Rossa Savonese’
Runner bean ‘White Emergo’
Tomato ‘Falcorosso’, ‘Costoluto Fiorentino’ and ‘Roma’

Lots of lovely tasty Italian flavour there, and I hope you appreciate quite what a departure it is for me to grow potatoes other than ‘Duke of York’ (early) and ‘British Queen’ (second early): my family isn’t going to know what’s hit them.

Plus I’m ordering up some sweet potato slips and some tomatillo seeds to try as my brand new, never grown ‘em before veg for this year. Well that’s not quite true: I have tried, and miserably failed, to grow sweet potatoes before but that doesn’t count. I have a few new tricks up my sleeve this year so I’m having another go. Can’t wait!

Posted in sowing | Tagged | 3 Comments »

A (very) little salad

January 17, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

It’s not very impressive, is it?

I usually do a bit better with my winter salads than this sorry lot.

I’m a keen greenhouse gardener in winter: there’s nothing quite like sitting in a cosy frost-free greenhouse listening to the icy rain pattering on the roof. I particularly hate to see the greenhouse borders sitting empty when they could be growing all sorts of tasty things: greenhouses become mini-polytunnels in winter, keeping lots of leafy veg just that bit more protected to get them through the winter. As well as salad leaves, you can grow chard, radishes, overwintering spring onions and even things like turnip tops – another one on my must-try list.

Though admittedly salad leaves always look a bit raggedy and unhappy by about January, you can generally still count on a few leaves you can pick over and enjoy in sandwiches. But this year I’ve got the timing all wrong and I’ve completely kiboshed my usual winter harvest.

Timing is crucial when overwintering crops: sow your seed too early, and they’ve peaked by autumn and are long gone when the cold weather comes. Just right, and they’ll be at harvest stage just as the cold weather hits so that as long as you go easy on them, you can carry on picking all through winter (they’ll grow a bit more during warmer spells).

Sow too late, though, and though they’ll make it up above ground level, they’ll hunker down and shiver all winter long at seedling stage, which is no good at all. I sowed these in September, thinking I could count on an extra month or so of warm weather through October and that should be enough. How wrong can you be?

So, note to self: don’t sow salads past, say, mid-August in future. Though of course, as soon as I do that we’ll have the warmest winter since time began and they’ll all bolt in the balmy temperatures before Christmas. Sometimes I think I’ve got a better chance of winning the lottery than growing my veg to perfection, what with increasingly impossible to predict weather plus the usual setbacks from slugs and domestic distractions.

Still, as so often with veg-growing, there’s a compensation: since the thaw set in my little baby plants have been positively basking in 12 degree temperatures as the sun hits the greenhouse, so they’ve just started perking up and putting out fresh new leaves. I reckon give it another month (and no more snow) and they’ll be well and truly off the starting blocks, which will mean I’m probably going to be enjoying my earliest-ever spring salad crops this year.  Looks like my lottery ticket is going to come in after all!

Posted in Greenhouse growing, sowing | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments »

Bird feed

January 14, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

'Hey, you, what have you done with my garden?'

Poor old Blossom. She does hate the snow. All her favourite scratching spots have disappeared, and dust baths are out of the question. Little wriggly insects are tucked away out of reach and she can’t even peck at the grass as we haven’t seen that since before Christmas.

Blossom is the last of a long line of chickens, and has outlived all her peers (variously eaten by the fox-next-door or overtaken by old age – the last one passed away quietly in her sleep last October. RIP Primrose.). She is also a curmudgeonly bully – chickens are breathtakingly selfish and not nearly as nice and clucky as they look – so I’m not inflicting her on any new chickens just yet as she has a habit of pecking out feathers, chasing off rivals and generally being bitchy. In fact she’s the ultimate nasty neighbour – if she was a person she’d have multiple ASBOs by now.

Actually it’s quite nice having her on her own as she’s become more of a pet than a productive extension to the veg patch. I can also let her have the run of my garden as a single chicken doesn’t do that much damage in comparison to half-a-dozen scratching up plants, pecking away leaves and having dustbaths in the middle of your thyme bed. However she will have to be confined to quarters in a few weeks’ time as I wouldn’t trust her an inch after the first bulbs poke their noses above ground. There are also a paltry amount of eggs from one chicken and we’re having to buy them from the shops, much to my disgust, so I’ll have to solve the problem of how to  integrate my white-feathered hooligan with a new flock before long.

Blackbird in snow

One of our regulars: Mrs Blackbird enjoying the chicken's scraps in the snow

In the mornings Blossom’s first port of call is the sliding doors which lead out onto the patio from our dining room. That’s because I’ve taken to tearing up all our scraps – everything from last night’s peas to the crust from our breakfast toast – and throwing them outside. This saves me carrying them down to the chicken run (I’m getting very hermit-like as this endless winter goes on) and also means I can feed all the poor little birds scraping by in my garden without fear of the cat (who is pathologically afraid of chickens) going anywhere near them.

So far we’ve got a thrush, a pair of blackbirds, a pied wagtail and a robin dropping by as regular visitors, all looking like puffballs with their feathers fluffed out against the cold. Feeding birds so close to the house also seems to put off big bully birds like magpies, crows and pigeons, as well as squirrels, so the littlies have the run of the place, much to our delight.

I’m hoping they’ll remember this as a cool place to hang out once summer’s come, as I need them to keep my gooseberries free of sawfly and my beans clear of blackfly, as well as clearing all the caterpillars off my blackcurrants. They can have a look at the apple trees while they’re at it and see if they can do something about the woolly aphid I found this winter. Birds in the veg garden are a mixed blessing – I seem to spend half my time keeping them off (brussels sprouts, cabbages and calabrese mainly) and the other half encouraging them in – but I wouldn’t be without them.

Posted in Other stuff | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Rogues’ Gallery: Rats

January 11, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

You hardly ever see rats: usually just big holes like the one I found this week

Shhh – say it quietly.

Nobody ever mentions the r-word: but every vegetable garden has them. They say no-one, anywhere, is more than six metres from the nearest Rattus norvegicus (that’s the brown rat – the black rat, Rattus rattus, is apparently almost extinct nowadays despite its notoriety as the cause of the Black Plague. Black rats have pink, hairless tails; brown rats have hairy tails. So now you know.)

I happen to think that most rats get a bad press. City rats, granted, are horrible things: lice-ridden, flea-ridden, destructive disease carriers that eat rubbish and carrion and are generally disgusting. But your average veg-garden rat doesn’t have much access to carrion (foxes get there first) and prefers your sweetcorn anyway. And there’s the rub. You’ve never seen a veg plant stripped till you’ve seen a stand of sweetcorn after a rat attack. They shin up even the tallest stem, peel back the papery covers and all you find in the morning is a bare core with not a single kernel left. I gave up after my third successive harvest yielded not one single cob.

Apart from this – which admittedly was incredibly frustrating - I’ve never noticed any other damage caused by rats in particular. You do find rat holes from time to time, but they’re rarely near the veg plants. Apart from the sweetcorn, my main reason for not particularly wanting rats on the plot is that they give me the creeps. Which isn’t a very good reason, but, well, I don’t get many people disagreeing with me.

So to discourage rats on the veg plot I watch what I put on the compost heap – nothing cooked, for a start – and turn it regularly to disrupt any nests. Bird food is a no-no and I try to keep things more-or-less tidy.

I don’t use poison – I’ve seen a dog after eating a poisoned rat and it’s not pretty. I do possess a humane rat trap but rats are phenomenally clever and despite my attempts at disguise they’ve never once gone anywhere near it. This leads me to the depressing conclusion that I am more stupid than a rat, but also means I’ve never had to deal with the problem of what exactly you do with them once you’ve caught one.

Sweep running away as usual (left) and Sooty: anti-rat protection par excellence

No: my weapons of choice are small-ish and so furry that you frequently forget their general cuteness disguises a ruthless killer instinct. These particular rat deterrents require regular maintenance in the shape of tins of Felix and Go-Cat, but that’s a small investment when you consider that there has been hardly a rat on the place since I got them. And I harvested my first-ever sweetcorn cob last year.

They’re called Sooty and Sweep, and they’re feral cats. I got them from the Cats’ Protection League after reading an article about how desperate they were for homes for the many feral (wild) cats they were given: most people when they rescue a cat want a pet cat, which lives in a house, but these are cats which hate houses and though they do need the shelter of a shed or outhouse, they aren’t tame at all (or at least, they weren’t when I got them: Sooty in particular is very fond of a cuddle these days).

I think they scare away the rats rather than actually catching them: certainly I haven’t found any corpses. They’re equally effective against mice and rabbits. True, it is the nuclear option and it’s not a solution that suits everyone: feral cats will render your garden a bird-free zone and though that’s not a problem on the allotment it might be at home. They also require regular visits right through winter – I feed them every couple of days or so. But if like me your rodent situation is getting desperate, cats are by far the most effective way of getting the balance back in your favour again. And besides, it’s nice to have someone to talk to apart from yourself when you’re weeding – even if they do try and roll over in ecstasy asking for a tummy tickle just where your seedling onions are coming up.

Posted in Allotments, Harvesting, Rogues' Gallery | Tagged , , | 5 Comments »

Southern exposure

January 8, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

If you’re going to have this much freezing weather, you might as well make the most of it. So I’ve been turning it to my advantage this week with a shivery sort of visit up to the allotment to recruit the sub-zero temperatures onto my side in the on-going battle against pests.

In carefully covering up all the bits of my allotment which I want to cultivate next year (to protect them from excessive wet, soil erosion, weed seeds and so on) I’ve also been keeping out much of the frost. 

That means my nice neat polythene covers have been providing a cosy shelter to thousands, if not millions, of slugs, snails and other pests, plus their eggs: even the birds haven’t been able to get at them. In other words, I’ve been doing all my pests a monumental favour ever since about October.

Or I would have been, if I wasn’t planning to play them a cunning trick just about now, when the temperatures are at rock bottom and I can catch them with their guard down. You see, while it’s so frozen, there’s no risk of waterlogging or weed invasion – so I can uncover the soil again and let the slimy ones shiver in full view of whole flocks of hungry birds. Since they’ve all gathered under that polythene, and are half-asleep anyway, it’s just a matter of turning it over: the birds get a bonanza of slug eggs, wireworms and other tasty little morsels, which keeps them happy at a time of year when they need all the help they can get and clears out my veg patch just in time for spring.

The only thing is, the frost has been unbelievably hard for this southerly bit of the country - we’ve been recording down to  -9°C at night at my relatively exposed allotment, a good two degrees below the temperature in my garden (which was cold enough). So much so, in fact, that when I pulled back the covers I found that the ground has in fact frozen underneath as well. In fact, everything was frozen to each other: I had to hammer the bricks out of the ice where they were frozen onto the polythene, and break the little puddles of solid ice where they’d grouped themselves around the edges. Who’d garden in winter, eh?

It may be that I didn’t really need to bother after all: the usual clusters of slugs and snails upside-down on the polythene are missing and there’s no evidence of them on the ground, either. But I suspect this may be deceptive: just underneath those sheets of ice is a relatively warm and dry pile of soil and manure, and if I were a slug that’s where I’d head for. So I’m going to leave the covers off, just to be on the safe side, until the weather forecast tells me the big thaw is on.

My bones are telling me it’s going to be wet’n'warm all the way till spring after that. Can’t wait…

Posted in Allotments, Soil care | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

Going for gold

January 5, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

So, that was officially the coldest December for 13 years. Actually I think it might be a bit longer than that – I can just about remember 1996 and I’m sure four weeks solid of ice, sleet and snow would have registered. But anyway…. it’s cold. Very, very cold.

Gardening outside is more or less off the agenda, of course, so I’ve largely retreated into the greenhouse. To cheer myself up I’ve given myself a little challenge: I want to try to grow really, really big onions.

Actually I’m a bit late out of the starting gate already: the traditional time to sow competition onions is Boxing Day, but I spent my Boxing Day nursing a hangover and refereeing small children fighting over skateboards and Nintendo DS’s so onion-sowing was a little low on my list of priorities. Anyway, I  figure as it’s my first attempt I’m hardly likely to sweep the board and a week or so here or there won’t matter too much.

Exhibition onion growing is a sport which doesn’t have devotees so much as obsessives. If you want to see just how far people are prepared to go to produce the fabled ten-pounder onion, take a look at the allotment diary of this dedicated Yorkshire grower: he puts little plastic collars on sticks around the growing seedlings to keep them upright, for heavens’ sake. So far he’s managed 6lbs 10oz, which in my book is pretty damn impressive. And then there’s John Sifford, from Halesowen in the West Midlands, who in 2005 broke the world record with a bulb weighing a little over 16lbs 8oz. He’s not giving much away, but it’s telling that all the champion exhibition onion growers seem to grow their onions under glass and in containers. Hmm…

I doubt I’ll reach quite those heady heights, but to give myself the best possible start I’ve been taking lots of advice from the past master of such things: Medwyn Williams, who has forgotten more than I will ever know about growing onions from seed and has an MBE and ten Chelsea gold medals to show for it.

The first secret of success with exhibition onions, he says, is choosing the right variety. Onion showing is an ancient art, and the very best varieties have proved themselves over many, many decades. Truly dedicated onion growers develop their own strains from particularly large specimens they’ve grown: but they’re all derived from old favourites like The Kelsae, Ailsa Craig and of course Bedfordshire Champion, which is the one I’ve gone for on my first attempt.

Medwyn says you need to sow into modules of good-quality multi-purpose compost – brought into the greenhouse in advance so it’s warmed to air temperature (this I did yesterday – not that the greenhouse is very warm, but at least 2°C above is better than the -5°C outside).

Then once the seeds have germinated, you prick them out while still at the hooked-over hairpin stage and pot them on religiously as soon as they need it (apparently the longer they hold onto that little black seed case at the end, the happier they are).

Medwyn uses artificial light and heat to get them through February: this may be a bit beyond me, so I’ll just have to cross that bridge when I come to it. Right now, I’m just hoping my little seeds will germinate OK and make it through this punishing weather in one piece.

I’ll bring you progress reports as the year goes on. The village autumn show is in September, so I’ve got nine months to get it right – wish me luck!

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