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Be a part of our home-growing heritage and ‘Dig for Victory’
Calling all amateur growers for Summer Fruit & Vegetable Competition
Your flower show needs you!
Sign up to the amateur growers’ Summer Fruit & Vegetable Competition at the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show and prove that you can ‘dig for victory’.
When food was scarce during the austere war years, the RHS was helping the nation grow their own fruit and vegetables through the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign. Sixty years on, growing your own is enjoying a revival with more and more people keen to follow a healthier diet and looking to the RHS for advice on how to get started.
If you love growing your own produce you can enter your prize specimens and see the fruits of your labours displayed at the largest annual flower show in the world. For a schedule including a full list of classes and how to enter the competition, please contact the RHS Shows Department on 020 7630 7422, or send a self-addressed A5 envelope to: Shows Department, Royal Horticultural Society, 80 Vincent Square, London SW1P 2PE, marking your envelope ‘Fruit & Vegetable Comp HCPFS’. The closing date for entry forms is 1 July 2005.
There are dozens of classes open to all entrants in both fruit and vegetable categories, including; French beans, courgettes, shallots, salad onions, coloured potatoes, spinach and kohlrabi in the vegetable categories; and blackcurrants, strawberries, tayberries, red currants, gooseberries and jostaberries in the fruit categories. Culinary herbs will also be judged in collections of six types from varieties such as angelica, borage, chervil, coriander, fennel, rosemary, sweet cicely and tarragon. A monetary prize for first, second and third are given in each class.
To make sure your produce is at its best for the competition, the RHS website offers a wealth of practical advice on growing fruit and vegetables. Visit www.rhs.org.uk/advice/problems_archive.asp for everything you need to know about growing your own produce, including ‘Ten Easy Vegetables’, ‘Growing Salads and Herbs’ and ‘Crop Rotation in the Vegetable Garden’. Fruit fans can find advice on topics such as ‘Choosing Apple Cultivars’, ‘Pruning and Training’ and ‘Pollination of Glasshouse Crops’. To make sure that you’re choosing and growing the best cultivars, browse the latest downloadable list of AGM (Award of Garden Merit)* vegetables at www.rhs.org.uk/plants/documents/AGMveg2004.pdf and AGM fruit at www.rhs.org.uk/plants/documents/AGMfruit2004.pdf
RHS Garden Wisley will be exhibiting a special Dig for Victory display in the Growing & Showing Marquee over the final weekend of the show to tie-in with the official national commemorations on 10 July. The display will sit alongside the entries in the amateurs’ competition open to anyone who grows fruit or vegetables in allotments or gardens.