“Only in dreams are carrots as big as bears” – Yiddish Proverb

Growing giant vegetables is one of those hobbies that seeps into your soul without you even knowing.  One minute you are tending a row of cabbages, the next, you have planted a pumpkin, and before you know it, hte pumpkin has grown, it is getting bigger - it is bigger than your neighbours!  Hoorah! You are growing giant vegetables!!

Vegetable shows gently seize hold of a slice of village life every autumn, but this hub delves deeper – it goes below the surface of a typically rural British snapshot. To discover exactly who it is that supports these shows both through their organisation and more particularly their participation.

It is creative, gently energetic, and almost magical to take a tiny seed and nurture it into a showground specimen. By including the bonus of a competitive element or a show at the end of the growing process, so to one’s feelings of satisfaction and wonderment you can add an additional frisson of excitement. Taking the ordinary, the mundane the easily accessible and comprehensible and pushing it further, taking it beyond the boundaries of what most people think is either possible or sensible.

We all sat there at school and wrestled with the length and complexity of the chemical reactions for photosynthesis whilst our mutual furrowings and perplexity were thrown into stark relief by the effortless ease with which nature constantly applied the theory all around us, putting it into practice in every field, garden, roadside verge or crack between a paving stone. To be the Pygmalian-esque orchestrator of this development is not only awesome in its fundamental sense, but enormous fun. I challenge you - imagine a four-foot marrow, a 35lb cabbage or a pumpkin so large it has to be transported on a trailer – really imagine it … now I know you’re smiling and perhaps intrigued... And that’s what giant vegetable growing is all about.

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“They are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom” - Marcel Proust (1871 – 1922)

There are 15 current vegetable-weight world records listed in the Guinness Book of World Records, and all of these are held by men. Of these an impressive 10 are held by Britons. If you add those categories on the cusp of the vegetable/fruit debate - for produce such as cucumbers, courgettes and pumpkins - you find an additional male British Marrow record-holder. Surely this must be one of the few remaining examples of a sport which the British gave to the world and in which we can still claim to excel. Of course there will be those sceptics who struggle to view giant vegetable-growing as a ‘sport’ at all, but its participants and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary are united – a sport is a competitive activity, especially an outdoor one involving physical exertion. Which would by anybody’s definition include digging a bed for giant prize-winning parsnips.

So who are these current record holders and what enthused them about the pursuit in the first place? What captivated them and how did they go on to excel? Did they have year upon year of huge produce, or was it just a one-off fluke? Do they specialise in growing only e.g. onions, or do they have a go at everything? Are they now banned from entering the village show? Have they ever been the victim of sabotage or had suspicions about underhand practices or dirty tricks?

Record Holders

Ian Neale (52lb Beetroot in 2001)

Alan Hattersley (54lb Cauliflower in 1999)

Alfred J Cobb (27lb Cucmber in 2003)

Fred Charlton (17lb Leek in 2002)

John Handbury (135lb Marrow in 1998)

Mel Ednie (16lb Onion in 1994)

“Gardens are not made by sitting in the shade” – Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936)

Like repainting the window frames or wallpapering the hall, a good vegetable garden is all in the preparation – or at least if not all in it (come May, June and beyond) then it certainly seems like it is from November to March. It is a waiting game for those in more northern climes, whilst the amateurs in the South West will have been frost-free for some time and well able to make progress with seed selection and sowing.

Fortunately there is no shortage of advice and contradictory growing methods propounded by the experts and record breakers and amateurs. Different and elaborate techniques abound, including under soil heating, shading systems, irrigation pipes and the like. Nevertheless it does appear that an over-emphasis on preparing the plot may in some circumstances have been ill judged.

Mistake number one is to imagine that most of these monster specimens are grown in the ground. As a rule, this is to be avoided as there are too many uncontrollable variables. Nor is it necessary to have a huge amount of space - there some things that can be grown in almost any garden. Indeed even if you lack a garden, simply owning a drainpipe can be enough if your heart is set on growing an enormous parsnip.

“I’d rather sit alone on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion” Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

“What I say is that if a man really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.” – A.A. Milne

Every sport has its figurehead, its Pele, Bradman or Bannister – someone who pushes back the boundaries. For competitive giant vegetables the undisputed king is Bernard Lavery. Now several years after retirement, still the holder of 3 world vegetable records (plus another one for a 19ft Petunia), Dr Lavery has retired to the fertile Lincolnshire fens but grew his numerous record-breaking specimens in the damp verdure of the Rhondda.

In recent years Dr Lavery has become a resource for many amateur growers providing advice on growing techniques but also providing seeds harvested form championship specimens, and documenting the pedigrees of future progeny.

Bernard Lavery's Vegetable-Growing CV

18lb Brussels Sprout in 1992

124lb Cabbage in 1989

65lb Courgette in 1990

“The day is coming when a single carrot freshly observed will set off a revolution” – Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)

There is an ongoing saga and controversy about seeds – particularly for pumpkins. The general wisdom seems to be that with the exception of carrots, parsnips and radishes (for which one uses the ‘Flacky’, ‘Gladiator’ and ‘April Cross’ varieties respectively) one harvests the seeds for other prospective prize-winners from the innards of a previous monster. Thus one can create a gargantuan pedigree, akin to that of a racehorse or Champion at Crufts.

Of course there is a danger that one could take these things too seriously. There is no rule to say that you have to do this, in fact no rules about what sort of seed you use at all, and scarcely any rules whatsoever – unless you participate in the now abandoned Milford-on-Sea v Everton Annual Village Pumpkin Contest.

The battle was scrapped a few years ago after a row about the integrity of Milford-on-Sea’s victory - an impressive winning entry of 819lb grown in a (whisper in hushed tones) greenhouse. Competitors from neighbouring Everton questioned the validity of the win and argued vehemently that all entered pumpkins should be grown without cover on allotments or in gardens. Milford not to be outdone in the fit of pique contest fired back with counter claims of rule-bending by Everton: including pumpkins fed on beers and suggestions of other performance-enhancing drugs.

After members of the Everton and Lymore Social Club weighed into the spat with a claim that every entry should be grown from seeds of the ‘Hundredweight’ variety – Milford gardeners traditionally favour ‘Atlantic Giant’ seeds – the social club at Milford organised a meeting to thrash out the rules of the competition to which no one turned up and thus the contest buried itself in a mound of self-important bureaucracy from which it has yet to re-sprout

“A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables” – Gertrude Stein

Gardening is an optimistic pursuit, you are always looking forward to the next stage: planning next year’s project; waiting through the winter until you can plant your seeds; waiting for the shoots to emerge so you can thin them out. Unless of course they don’t emerge. Or they do but get eaten by slugs, or pigeons - ‘weeded’ by over exuberant child-helpers or thrive into adolescence only to be blighted by aphids or vine borers or any one of a myriad alternative disasters which can befall an unwary plant and its grower.

Having achieved successful germination and addressed the natural threats to the crop, the general wisdom is that you should not leave the actual production of fruits to chance. Many growers are down amongst the courgette leaves with a paintbrush trying a little self-pollination...

“Let my words like vegetables be tender and sweet, for tomorrow I may have to eat them” – Anon

It is a ruthless business. Lets suppose you started off with up to sixteen seedlings - as the plants start to crowd one another it becomes necessary to start thinning them out. When the plants have up to three or four leaves numbers should be down to four plants. When it is time to put up the windbreak you should be down to two

Whether you are breeding winners or simply running short of space in the allotment, there is no room for sentimentality. Finally when the plants have four foot vines you have to thin out one of the two remaining specimens so you are down to just one – your child, your protégé, the chosen one in whom you place your hopes and aspirations for a year’s worth of work. This is when you look at the plant you’ve just pulled out and wonder if you have just killed the next World Record Pumpkin.

“Never bolt your door with a boiled carrot” – Irish Proverb

“He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama” – E.M. Cioran

Whilst seen by participants as a ‘sport’ as much as a hobby, competitive vegetable growing is one of the last bastions of true amateurism. The National UK Giant Vegetable Championships at Shepton Mallet are one of the showpieces of the National Amateur Gardening Show held every year at the start of September. The show attracts over 45,000 visitors who come as much for the breathtaking floral displays, architectural garden designs and chance to meet the experts as they do for the giant vegetables themselves.

The painstaking production of outsize, quirky or more tasty home-grown produce shown publicly with much pride and preparation flies completely in the face of the efforts of the professional growers who are under constant pressure from the supermarkets to grow for bland uniformity which, we are told, is what we all want.

Of course it’s not really what we want that counts. What matters is that it fits into the carrot-washing or potato-sorting machine at the enormous fresh produce depots of every major food retailer. Miles of conveyors chunter incessantly day and night like a mesmerising trip through the round window on PlaySchool - churning out neatly matching bags of Stepford-vegetables. But are we as a nation gradually voting with our feet, purse or trowel? Is there a gentle bucolic revolution and a collective realisation that ‘cheap’ food comes at too high a price? Certainly widespread mistrust of intensive farming methods has caused a shift in the nation’s eating habits. Organic is fashionable, and increasingly visible. Suddenly it is cool to be hands-on and interested in ‘real’ food.

Perhaps vegetable-growing as a breeding-ground for anti-globalisation anarchy is a bridge too far, but the fierce satisfaction in doing it yourself; harvesting your own produce, whether it be malformed and misshapen, or bounteous and voluptuous is evidenced in the willingness of gardeners to exhibit the fruits (and vegetables) of their labours. The image of growers across the nation sleeping in their gardens to prevent acts of sabotage by rivals, is apparently much more likely with the local village show, which still harbours the vestiges of voodoo vegetable growing and gardening mystique, rather than the larger national shows, but urban myth or not, I’m taking no chances over my autumnal beauties.

The village of Mere Brow near Ormskirk is the setting for a magnificent giant pumpkin competition, where last year the champion pumpkin weighed in at 717lb - albeit a midget compared with the current British record 914lb pumpkin, and the 1689lb world record holder. This is one competition where children seem to have as much chance as the adults with their entries almost as big as they are in many cases The local youngsters’ glee is evident in the fact that an entry in this competition guarantees them a pass-out from the headteacher for the afternoon to take the credit for their year’s hard work. Not restricted to local however, competitors come form far and wide.

On a practical note - exactly how do you get a 700lb pumpkin to Ormskirk in one piece for the ceremonial weigh-in? And what on earth do you do with it afterwards?