Foremost, but not First

'The Monday Group' display their best taters.

My RHS Level 2 Practical course at Reaseheath College came to its conclusion yesterday, with a handful of odd tasks we needed to complete in order to finish the syllabus fitted in between the showers.  We thinned out the parsnips on our plots, took out a drill to sow lettuce seeds, weeded our peas and beans and tested the temperature of the fast-decaying compost heap.  We made an insect house out of a polystyrene cup, sawed wood to make a log stack (again for wildlife to shelter in over the winter - they spoil their bugs at Reaseheath), and finally took cuttings of Berberis.  And we had a final dig through of our potato patches, rounding up the handful of stragglers that had evaded us on Saturday morning, when the rest were lifted for the First Early Potato Show.

It's often said (especially, as I recall well, to the non-athletic kid on School Sports Day) that what matters in any competition isn't the winning, it's the taking part.  No-one who has ever witnessed a vegetable show, be it at a major RHS-accredited event or at their local village hall or allotment hut is under any such delusion.  To hell with 'play up, play up and play the game!': the ethos of the Reaseheath First Early Potato Show, in common with all horticultural competitions, was the thoroughly Spartan 'come back with your shield or on it!'  There was no room for failure.   From the moment we drew the name of our selected spud out of the bag back in March, victory was all.

Baskets of spuds, including Foremost, in all its many forms...

The laurels would go to whoever could present a plate of the best four potatoes.  The chosen taters needed to match each other as closely as possible, be of a good size, of a shape correct for their variety, perfectly clean of mud or dirt and yet without damage to their frail skins.  At the beginning of the week, we had seen four potatoes chosen from just two roots clean up nicely and make a perfectly satisfactory exhibit.  With two entire rows to choose from, how difficult could it possibly be to select four matching spuds? 

I had high hopes that if I started at the well-watered end of the row I had spaced widely, I would find good-sized near-perfect examples of my 'Foremost' taters from the first two or three roots.  But having planted the other row closer together, and having deliberately not watered the eastern end of each row to find out how much difference that made, I would need to lift them all that morning, just to assess the experiment.

Show-stoppers - prize winners from our group (well done Maz and Crispin)

To my surprise, failing to water and close spacing seemed to have made virtually no difference to the number or quality of potatoes lifted from each row, or from either end of the row.  The result of the experiment was clear - potatoes are apparently completely impervious to how you treat them!  There was a slightly higher yield from the ones planted close together, though of course that row had more tubers in to start with.  But regarding size and quality, the pattern was roughly the same across the whole site: a good mixture of 'baby' new potatoes and a fair number of medium-sized tubers, none of which resembed each other to any appreciable extent. 

I carefully washed off those from the 'spaced at 30cm centres' row.  It's amazing how many different forms a potato from a single cultivar can take!  There were longish tubers, round ones, knobbly ones and smooth ones, but finding any four that had more in common than membership of the species Solanum Tuberosum was surprisingly tricky.  I had planned to leave the dirt on the others, to help them store for a little longer, but in the end washed all of them too.  The selection before me remained an impressive illustration of mashable diversity, and now time was running out to select and prepare any of them for the show.

With high hopes of clinching victory - before I uncovered the disappointing truth - I had brought a soft paintbrush with me to help clean off every last spec of dirt without scraping the skin, but no amount of archaeologist-like attention to detail was going to save the day.  Victory would surely go to another...

Luckily, the 'other' in question was Marion, celebrating her 'twenty-first' birthday (though not for absolutely the first time...!), and accepting her prize most graciously.  That the Friday Group managed the actual 'Best in Show' plate of spuds was mildly galling.  There were mutterings in the Monday group that they had been favoured with more show-friendly cultivars; clearly, we ought to have resorted to proper allotmenteers' sabotage techniques after all, and blasted their plots with 'Roundup'.

No prizes for rude spuds...!

Alas, there will be no opportunity for revenge; 'school's out' for summer now, and although some of us may be sneaking back to harvest our peas and beans, that may be the end of formal study at Reaseheath for me for some time.  After two wonderfully enjoyable years as a part-time student there, I'm not sure that there will be time to fit in another course, my home and commercial gardening commitments, and my forthcoming new job.  Because, after two years away from the fray, I'm rejoining Citizens Advice in a new role.  The official job title is 'Training and Network Development Officer', though 'Counter-propaganda and Resistence Support Officer' seems equally apt! 

But before that gets underway, there might be the chance to help on another Tatton Park show garden for the college.  Watch this space!