Eat your veg before it eats you

An hour and a half north up the M5 (on a clear Sunday at a steady lick) is the turn-off for the M50, gateway to the Malvern Hills and the Three Counties Showground.

There it was that the Dixons and young friend made their way, in search of horticultural inspiration – and maybe a bargain or two – at the annual Autumn Show.

Vegetables are big at the Autumn Show. Big in the sense of verging on the monstrous. It takes a special sort of gardener to grow carrots as long as your arm, leeks as long as both your arms and parsnips as long as your arms, your mum's and dad's arms and your Auntie Mabel from Droitwich's arms laid together end-on-end.

Mind you, by the time you got three or four inches down the tuber, the parsnips were pretty spindly and wouldn't have offered much to roast come Christmas.

But on they stretched, their thread-like taproots folded up and down the trestle tables in the competition marquee.
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One of the most noticeable things about giant vegetables, apart from their very size, is their sheer irredeemable ugliness. This is particularly so, we discovered, in the case of the swede.

Now your common-or-garden buy-it-at-the-greengrocers family- runabout swede is an unassuming sort of creature. Yellowy-orange with a few purple bumps, and embarrassed by its close consanguinity with the turnip, it sits in your vegetable rack waiting for its chance to be boiled, mashed with butter, left uneaten, made into soup, left again and eventually tipped down the drain.

But your Formula 1 competition swede is a vegetable of a different water. For starters, it's the size of a small suitcase. For seconds, it looks for all the world as if it's been rough-hewn from the trunk of a gnarled tree and then liberally doused in blue paint.

Edible it is not (and that's about the only thing it has in common with its smaller and smoother brothers and sisters). Uncanny it most definitely is.

Then there was the pumpkin.

Or Mongo the Pumpkin Monster, to give it its full name. Grown by two proud Brits, Mark and Frank Baggs, this was the new European record-holder, weighing in at 1,341.7lb. That's more than 600kg if you think in metres. By the time we got to it the stalk had fallen off, but even so it was a staggering example of man's ability to wrestle with nature and tame it.

There were of course smaller-scale encounters of the fruit-and-veg kind: rosy apples ready for the scrunching, succulent pyramids of tomatoes, earthy, glistening potatoes: all guaranteed to inspire the visitor to greater feats of growing next year.

But there was far more to see than just veggies. There were antique petrol engines of vaguely agricultural extraction, chugging away as they pumped water from one basin to another, at once purposeful and aimless and doing heaven knows what for their owners' carbon footprints.

There was the man on his ancient lawnmower, pootling up and down a narrow patch of greensward and entertaining an audience of maybe one or two.

There were the stands, selling everything from tatty toolkits to expensive whirlpool baths.

(Who goes to a country show to buy a whirlpool bath? The vendors were far from busy, except for a huddle of children, mostly of the Dixon party, trailing their fingers in the warm bubbling water and dreaming of the day when Dad would be able to afford one for each of their bedrooms. Dream on, dears, dream on.)

There were miracle cures for everything from dry skin to galloping gut-rot. There were country-style hats, country-style coats, country-style trousers.

Mrs D exercised amazing self-control when it came to buying plants. The young friend bought one of those sprinkler things that looks like a sunflower but whips around like a demented snake when you attach a garden hose. Won't his parents be pleased?