Harrogate Autumn Show 2009 Gallery

2009 was a bad year with leeks for me, a few of them went to seed and the others had a bulbous base to them. I therefore reverted to using celery as the back centre piece for the first time and it worked out very well. The celery was my exclusive Morning Star (Item 3083) which was grown in a new concrete block bed on my land. It had plenty of well rotted farm yard manure incorporated with the class 1 soil.

The celery was so good it would have done well on the show benches. The best celery head measured 18 inches in circumference at it's widest point. It was wrapped in some old well staurated capillary matting with the roots trimmed at the show before staging

Where do you start! just finished putting up the black cloth at the back of the stand. From now it's a case of finding all the vegetables from the array of boxes we have with us. We tend initially to cretae dishes that we need for the top shelf so that we can finish that one fairly quickly.

We had three round dry oasis on stakes either side of the celery. The idea was to try and imitate highway Traffic lights with Red Green and Amber colours. The Red were Tastyno tomatoes (Item 3150) the green ball were Brussel Sprouts NIZ 16-4021(Item 3023 and the Yellow ball was Sungold(Item 3149) My wife Gwenda built the six balls and it takes a few hours to complete as each tomato or Sprout needs to be stuck on with a cocktail stick.We then need a couple of hours afterwards to garnish in between each tomato with Faulds Parsley (Item 3203)

When we arrive at a show, the first thing we do is to erect trestle tables to work on. It's the only way that we can really complete the individual dishes and baskets properly

The end result is always worth the effort that we put into each display. However, at the end of the day it's the public that really make it worth while with their warm comments. The stand is usually 20 feet long, 7 foot wide and nine foot high.