Rain stops play

I've hardly made a single post about the field this year, this was mainly because we had such a crap start to the season that we almost retired for life in June! This year has got to have been the wettest year I've seen for a long time, it basically rained from the end of April until most of the way into August. Now whilst dahlias like to be watered they kinda take umbrage to being drowned for months on end! The worst of it was that the weather was to bloody lousy to allow us to put the roofs on the greenhouses so that we could keep the rain out.

Luckily the weather broke for a tad, and we managed to rebuild the top end of the large greenhouse which had been ripped apart by the winds in winter. With a sigh of relief we then slapped the roof on, and not a moment to soon because most of the plants at that end we're pretty close to death by root rot ...... and then it started raining again. Due to the sheer volume of water that decided it no longer wanted to fly we got flooded, again, and the plants which had just started to recover were knocked for six. We were a tad upset as all we could do is wait and hope that we didn't end up losing almost 100 plants.

Here comes the sun

Eventually somebody informed the sun that it was meant to be summer and if it didn't make an appearance then we were gonna sue it for failure to fulfil it's duties. So it made a brief appearance which allowed us to throw the rest of the roofs on and finally we could concentrate on actually growing flowers as opposed to teaching them how to scuba dive. Apart from the fact that we now had several dozen very sick plants that probably wouldn't survive until the showing season, all of the other plants were quite a bit behind because of the lack of sunshine. Unlike a garden we time our flowers to come out and be in perfect condition for very specific dates, and a delay of even a week could throw the whole of our season out of the window. Having eight months of effort pissed away by the weather is not a nice feeling.

Of course, all of the other growers were in exactly the same boat, so to speak, so if we could get to a show then we'd still stand a chance of winning. Unfortunately our plants were so far behind we couldn't even enter the first couple of shows of the season. Well, we could have, but the judges would probably take a dim view if we turned up with a couple of daisies, which was about all we had.

Blooming marvellous

Finally we have flowers and we can start showing and boy, did we show some beauties! One day they're gonna get fed up with us walking off with all of the trophies, but until then we're just gonna keep on winning. This year, we not only took nearly every championship that we entered but, for the first time in history, we won the grand-slam and took all three national trophies! How cool are we? Whilst other people may do the grand-slam in the future, they'll never be the first to do it so they'll just be playing catch up. Mind you, we are the reigning world champions, so it's not so surprising that we did it.

Barry's promised to get me a copy of all of the pictures that he took at the shows, including all of our winning entries, but he's been busy playing with google since the shows finished, so I haven't got them yet. In the meantime, here's some pictures that Ash took on one of the few sunny days that we had. As you can tell, I need to lose some bloody weight

¥