The Big Day Arrives

Saturday 21st April 2018

The Big Day

The biggest day so far in my tenure as Chair of the Fenland Smallholders Club. I am trying to usher in a new era of involvement, sharing and enthusiasm. 

Today I had asked the Grow Your Own group which I founded a few years back to help me lay on a meeting all about growing your own veg. 

We started with  a game I had devised where teams had to decide which of 5 was not a potato. No team made it intact past the third round! The point of this game was to show just how many varieties there are compared to what you see in your average supermarket.

The game was a good icebreaker and was the best way I could explain to members and to the rest of the committee how I want the club to feel.

I followed this up with an activity where everybody was a vegetable (some had to be pests too). We organised ourselves into perennials, polytunnel crops and others. The others then organised themselves into families. As usual, turnips and swedes went into the root crops and the newbie veg growers were surprised to discover that they actually belong with the cabbages. Next the pests attacked. Everybody moved round one and this was enough to befuddle some of the pests. (I resisted the temptation to throw an actual net over the brassica group).

The activity was designed as a demonstation of why we rotate crops. 

Next up were the display and activity tables where people got to talk to members of the Grow Your Own group in more detail. We covered crop rotation, pests and diseases and no-dig gardening. There was a Seed swap and a seedling sale, as well as soil testing and seed planting for children.

Soil testing

Seed Swap

Starting young

All of this, plus refreshments in the form of cakes and savouries all containing vegetables. 

We finished with me showing everybody my yet to be patented seed storage system and a Veg Gardeners Question Time.

The day absolutely flew by and it didn't seem like five minutes before we were hastily packing everything away and heading back home again. The day had been a great success. Attendance had been good, especially considering the fine weather alternatives, and it was great to see quite a few new faces come along. Hopefully they were impressed enough to come back another time.

As soon as I got home I got straight into the garden. There is a month's worth of catching up to do and the forecast is back to miserable again.

What with everything else, this week's record-breaking hot weather has been a missed opportunity for me and I need to grab every moment and every opportunity to catch up.

So it was in with the Second Early Potatoes, in with the parsnip seeds, in with carrot seeds. A quick bit of rotavating while the soil was dry enough and before I knew it darkness was falling.