Size Isn't Everything

THE national enthusiasm for growing our own fruit and vegetables, which waxes and wanes with the generations, is presently at a high pitch.

- Steven Desmond

The making of seedbeds, the ripening of onions and the relief when the first frost brings an end to the glut of runner beans are all part of a superior form of self-education, which reconnects us with the important things in life, such as fresh air and dirty fingernails.

The unfailing wonder at producing things we can eat from packets of seed can often be the first step on the road to success on the show bench. All over Britain, the month of August ushers in fêtes, shows and feast days, a key ingredient of which is typically a horticultural show of some kind. Everybody crowds in after lunch, when the judges have done their work, to inspect the neat rows of vegetables with here and there a winner’s card. Old so-and-so usually does well and walks away with a trophy or two and it would be easy to imagine that all this apparent perfection is the work of some magic circle that mere mortals could never hope to enter.

It’s not so. I distantly remember my first go, which included three sticks of rhubarb (Cawood Delight, as you ask), which I cut from my solitary-year-old plant at the end of the garden and trundled in my wheelbarrow to the school hall. The judge said afterwards—not to me, but to ​my expert neighbour—that it was the best rhubarb he’d seen on a bench in Yorkshire that year.