St Ives Flower and Produce Show 2010

Well, we did it! With just ten weeks to organise the first Show in fifteen years, the end result was a great success with over 250 exhibits and hundreds of visitors. Here’s a picture taken as the Show opened to the public (click to enlarge). And after all the hard work the Show day went off remarkably well with few problems. Laying out the tables the evening before, we found a bit more room was needed for exhibits, so had to do a bit of shuffling around.

When exhibitors were registering on the morning of the Show in came Giuseppe, one of our Italian allotment holders, with a box of vegetables to exhibit… having missed the deadline for registering a few days before. The Italian allotments are the envy of all other growers because of how effortlessly they organise their plots to efficiently produce fantastic vegetables throughout the year. He’d obviously misunderstood how to exhibit and we just couldn’t turn him away. So I had to do a bit of hurried finger tapping to produce exhibit cards for his stuff.

There was a bit of a bun fight in the Victoria sponge class, one of the most fiercely contested parts of the whole Show… particularly since both daughters had entries of some mark. Cue much stomping around accompanied by the odd verbal indication of disapproval when Beth saw she’d got a comment ‘lopsided’ against her effort. Nevertheless her cake was delicious. So was Becky’s, who managed to win second place with her version (which was about mark 3… she’d been practising all week!). Rumours that one of the judges did their back in lifting a slice are completely unfounded (see judge’s comment in photo below).

Several entries from the grandchildren in the chocolate crispies and decorated plant pot classes. Connor won second place for his plant pot, Izzy third place. And Barry was second in the home brewed dry white wine class.

And what about my own efforts? I’d originally planned to enter about 15 exhibits, but that got whittled down as the Show date approached. Even at 06:30 on the morning of the Show, examining my specimens in the cold light of dawn I was having doubts. Did that small mark on the garlic mean it wasn’t worth entering? Were the apples not colourful enough? In the end I entered five classes and got an award in all of them! My results were…

• Garlic (three) 1st!
• Exotic fruit (my three figs) 1st!
• Bread, 2nd
• Dessert apples, 2nd
• Tomatoes on the vine, commended

Lots of photos below… click any to enlarge.