Ahh, September. The month when the clouds of August roll back, the winds die down, the rain subsides and the sun bursts forth once more, just in time for everyone to go back to work.
All that remains of the summer holidays are memories, blurred photos of the family huddled miserably in the lee of a Welsh slate quarry, and bills.
Let’s not be gloomy, though. Because apart from meteorological schadenfreude, the end of summer also means the start of the vegetable show season.
Growers everywhere are preparing their prize specimens for display, and the methods they use to ensure success make the mind boggle.
Some competitors swear by secret potions. If you’ve ever wondered how that prize-winning pumpkin got so plump, then it’s probably thanks to regular doses of tea leaves, scrumpy and Bovril, drip-fed straight to the roots.
Some resort to furniture polish. It’s a well-known fact in horticultural circles that a quick spritz of Mister Sheen will give your best King Edwards the glossy shine they need to catch the judges’ eyes. And noses.
Some resort to trickery. Without giving away too many secrets, tying little kitchen weights to the ends of your runner beans is a favourite way of getting them to grow straight and true.
And while frowned upon in the bean-growing fraternity, the practice isn’t exactly illegal. As long as you don’t get caught.
No, the world of prize vegetable growing is a tough one, with no quarter asked or given. And anyone who enters it had better keep their wits about them.
It’s thus with some trepidation that we Dixons view the approach of this year’s Weston Village Flower Show, which takes place on Saturday, September 3 in the All Saints Centre, starting at 2.30pm.
Not that any of the competitors would stoop to skullduggery, you understand, but because our family reputation is at stake.
Mrs D has had some success in the past, but she’s already blaming the hopeless summer on a lack of winning produce. So perhaps this Saturday her two-year run as Onion Queen of Weston will finally come to an end.
And yours truly? Well, just read the introduction to the show programme. This year’s celebration of fruit-, flower- and vegetable-growing expertise will be opened, and the prizes presented, by none other than... Hugh Dixon, columnist with Ye Olde Bath Chronicle.
Ooh heck. Everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame, but this is taking the mickey. It means getting up on the hind legs and making a speech in which one tries one’s best to sound knowledgeable and entertaining about subjects about which one knows next to nothing.
Including chilli-growing, if this year’s miserable crop of duds is anything to go by.
Quite seriously, though, please don’t let this rare public appearance by your humble columnist put you off going. As all good gardeners will tell you, every rose has its thorn.
Showing posts with label weird vegetables. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weird vegetables. Show all posts
Thursday, September 01, 2011
Thursday, September 09, 2010
Karrottenstein will rise from the grave
Readers slavering in anticipation after last week’s mention of comedy vegetables will be delighted to know that our preposterous carrot won first prize at Weston Flower Show last weekend.
An in-depth trawl through Mrs D’s carrot patch produced a specimen of such ugly weirdness (or indeed weird ugliness – there’s not a lot of difference between the two) that it didn’t take much imagination to come up with a winner.
The carrot in question was broad and sturdy. It already had a knobbly protuberance that would make a passable nose, and markings suggestive of a mouth. We rifled one of the children’s old craft kits for a couple of googly eyes, and stuck them on with Evo-Stik. We grabbed a pair of spare stainless steel coach screws from the stainless steel coach screw cupboard and drove them into the sides of his neck.
A jubilee clip for a collar and a brass curtain ring round one of his carroty ears completed the ensemble.
(Money spent on DIY is money well spent. QED.)
Then we simply connected some electrodes to the carriage screws, awaited a passing thunderstorm, and faster than you can say “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley”, Karrotenstein was born.
To quote unashamedly and at length from our inspiration, Mrs S:
“I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.”
Scary stuff. And Mary Shelley could just as easily have been writing about the Dixon kitchen on the night before the show as about Frankenstein’s gloomy laboratory at the University of Ingolstadt.
On reflection, “born” is the wrong word to describe the arrival of Karrottenstein. His roots are in the ground (or they were until Mrs D pulled him up). Maybe it would be better to say that he was propagated.
Be that as it may, The Big K presented a frightening prospect to his creators, the latter-day Victor and Igor.
We did take some pictures, and offered them to the editor of The Bath Chronicle for publication. But he felt that they were a little too disturbing to see the light of day in a family newspaper.
If you have a strong stomach, though, and a stronger internet connection, you can see Karrottenstein's picture here.
Like Frankenstein’s monster before him, Karrottenstein met an early and unnatural fate. Following his triumph in the humorous vegetable stakes, the only way was down. None of us fancied eating a carrot covered in glue, so we removed the screws, the clips and the rest of the metalwork and consigned him to the compost heap.
But don’t sleep easy: his vital force lives on among the potato peelings.
Be warned, gentle reader: Karrottenstein will rise from the grave, and walk the earth once more.
An in-depth trawl through Mrs D’s carrot patch produced a specimen of such ugly weirdness (or indeed weird ugliness – there’s not a lot of difference between the two) that it didn’t take much imagination to come up with a winner.
The carrot in question was broad and sturdy. It already had a knobbly protuberance that would make a passable nose, and markings suggestive of a mouth. We rifled one of the children’s old craft kits for a couple of googly eyes, and stuck them on with Evo-Stik. We grabbed a pair of spare stainless steel coach screws from the stainless steel coach screw cupboard and drove them into the sides of his neck.
A jubilee clip for a collar and a brass curtain ring round one of his carroty ears completed the ensemble.
(Money spent on DIY is money well spent. QED.)
Then we simply connected some electrodes to the carriage screws, awaited a passing thunderstorm, and faster than you can say “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley”, Karrotenstein was born.
To quote unashamedly and at length from our inspiration, Mrs S:
“I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.”
Scary stuff. And Mary Shelley could just as easily have been writing about the Dixon kitchen on the night before the show as about Frankenstein’s gloomy laboratory at the University of Ingolstadt.
On reflection, “born” is the wrong word to describe the arrival of Karrottenstein. His roots are in the ground (or they were until Mrs D pulled him up). Maybe it would be better to say that he was propagated.
Be that as it may, The Big K presented a frightening prospect to his creators, the latter-day Victor and Igor.
We did take some pictures, and offered them to the editor of The Bath Chronicle for publication. But he felt that they were a little too disturbing to see the light of day in a family newspaper.
If you have a strong stomach, though, and a stronger internet connection, you can see Karrottenstein's picture here.
Like Frankenstein’s monster before him, Karrottenstein met an early and unnatural fate. Following his triumph in the humorous vegetable stakes, the only way was down. None of us fancied eating a carrot covered in glue, so we removed the screws, the clips and the rest of the metalwork and consigned him to the compost heap.
But don’t sleep easy: his vital force lives on among the potato peelings.
Be warned, gentle reader: Karrottenstein will rise from the grave, and walk the earth once more.
Thursday, September 02, 2010
When vegetables go get weird
So that’s it then. No more bank holidays between now and Christmas. A three-and-a-half-month desert of work, weekend, work, weekend, work…
Meanwhile, of course, the clouds have parted, the wind has dropped, the sun is shining and it’s summer at last, just in time for the kids to go back to school.
You get the picture. We need something to cheer us up. Now and every weekend between until the festive season.
Well, we can start with the Weston Village Flower Show. It’s this Saturday, and it should provide enough fun and jollity to get us through the first week of the Long Hard Slog Through Autumn.
Wallace and Gromit fans will remember the climactic scene in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Rotten cad and all-round bounder Victor Quartermaine chases Wallace, who has been transmogrified into a gigantic and voracious rabbit, through the village fruit and vegetable show. Quartermaine has armed himself with an ancient blunderbuss, loaded it with golden bullets supplied by the vicar, and is out for bunny flesh.
Meanwhile, in the skies above the show another chase is going on. Gromit and his arch enemy, Quartermaine’s slavering hound Philip, are slugging it out in an aerial dogfight (geddit?) in planes untethered from a fairground ride.
It’s not spoiling the story too much, if you’re one of the few people who don’t know it already, to reveal that the good end happily, the bad unhappily.
Don’t imagine for a minute that anything quite as dramatic as that will be happening in Weston on Saturday. The show is a generally calm affair, with more than 100 classes for produce, crafts, cooking and art.
With one exception: the Humorous Vegetable competition.
Quite possibly this part of the show was inspired by Blackadder II. (Remember the turnip that looked like a thingy?) It may equally well have its historical roots in the odd-looking produce that were such a memorable feature of That’s Life.
Be that as it may, if you want to see contorted carrots and preposterous potatoes in abundance, Weston All Saints Centre is the place to be this Saturday afternoon.
Mrs D was going to enter her secret weapon: a tromboncino. For those who don’t know – and there’s no reason why you should – a tromboncino is a monstrously mutated cousin of the courgette, with a curved body and a club-shaped blobby bit at the business end.
The specimen that Mrs D has nurtured lovingly from seed is now more than 120cm from nose to tail, and threw a system error when we tried to weight it on the electronic kitchen scales.
It also causes spontaneous and uncontrollable laughter in all who see it, and is quite rude into the bargain. We don’t really feel we can take it out of the house during daylight hours without causing a breach of the peace. So for now we’ll just stick with a comedy carrot.
Weston Village Flower Show, Saturday September 3, 2.30pm in the All Saints Centre, Weston High Street, Bath.
Meanwhile, of course, the clouds have parted, the wind has dropped, the sun is shining and it’s summer at last, just in time for the kids to go back to school.
You get the picture. We need something to cheer us up. Now and every weekend between until the festive season.
Well, we can start with the Weston Village Flower Show. It’s this Saturday, and it should provide enough fun and jollity to get us through the first week of the Long Hard Slog Through Autumn.
Wallace and Gromit fans will remember the climactic scene in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Rotten cad and all-round bounder Victor Quartermaine chases Wallace, who has been transmogrified into a gigantic and voracious rabbit, through the village fruit and vegetable show. Quartermaine has armed himself with an ancient blunderbuss, loaded it with golden bullets supplied by the vicar, and is out for bunny flesh.
Meanwhile, in the skies above the show another chase is going on. Gromit and his arch enemy, Quartermaine’s slavering hound Philip, are slugging it out in an aerial dogfight (geddit?) in planes untethered from a fairground ride.
It’s not spoiling the story too much, if you’re one of the few people who don’t know it already, to reveal that the good end happily, the bad unhappily.
Don’t imagine for a minute that anything quite as dramatic as that will be happening in Weston on Saturday. The show is a generally calm affair, with more than 100 classes for produce, crafts, cooking and art.
With one exception: the Humorous Vegetable competition.
Quite possibly this part of the show was inspired by Blackadder II. (Remember the turnip that looked like a thingy?) It may equally well have its historical roots in the odd-looking produce that were such a memorable feature of That’s Life.
Be that as it may, if you want to see contorted carrots and preposterous potatoes in abundance, Weston All Saints Centre is the place to be this Saturday afternoon.
Mrs D was going to enter her secret weapon: a tromboncino. For those who don’t know – and there’s no reason why you should – a tromboncino is a monstrously mutated cousin of the courgette, with a curved body and a club-shaped blobby bit at the business end.
The specimen that Mrs D has nurtured lovingly from seed is now more than 120cm from nose to tail, and threw a system error when we tried to weight it on the electronic kitchen scales.
It also causes spontaneous and uncontrollable laughter in all who see it, and is quite rude into the bargain. We don’t really feel we can take it out of the house during daylight hours without causing a breach of the peace. So for now we’ll just stick with a comedy carrot.
Weston Village Flower Show, Saturday September 3, 2.30pm in the All Saints Centre, Weston High Street, Bath.
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