Go Big Or Go Home

Size and straightness matter when it comes to displaying your vegetables at the annual show, discovers Steven Desmond

- Steven Desmond

Everyone who has ever admired a winning entry at a vegetable show has, before too long, over heard a voice somewhere nearby assert that they have better at home. Idle talk, of course, and unworthy, but there must always be people who look at the exhibits and wonder what they would have to do to get among the prizes.

In the past, the fraternity of  prizewinners always appeared to emanate a conspiracy of silence, as if the secrets of victory could only be divined by the members of a shadowy inner circle. If there ever was any truth in that notion, it has since vanished like the morning dew in the modern spirit of sharing valuable knowledge.

The first step to inevitable victory is a visit to your local vegetable show. Walk quietly along the benches and admire the winning entries. Compare them with the legion of non-winners and it will be obvious why at least some of them didn’t triumph. Some are entirely the wrong vegetable, others are the wrong number of specimens, others are all uneven sizes or rather mucky, and so on.

So far, the judging is easy. However, some are handsome, regular, uniform, neatly set out and apparently prize worthy, yet no coloured card stands by their side. And why has the judge handled some entries so roughly, snapping them in half or cutting them open with a knife? There is more to this than meets the eye.

Having carried out this simple exercise, you will immediately fall into one of two camps. You will either express polite interest and drift off to some other preoccupation— in which case, I refer you to any other article in this issue—or your mind will begin to race and calculate. If it’s the latter, read on.