A little follow up to yesterday’s post on showing tomatoes. Technically the process is known as staging but for my first go I decided to limit myself to thinking about it as ‘putting my tomatoes on a paper plate and then on a very big table, alongside other peoples’ tomatoes‘. And then as it turned out, plates weren’t a must-have for the truss class so that made life even more straightforward.
I didn’t think I was nervous, until I was handed a written card, on which one of the words – unsurprisingly – was ‘tomatoes’. Which started a whole train of thought that went something like this …. is that how ‘tomatoes’ is spelt – or should it be ‘tomatos’, or is that how ’potatos’ is spelt - or are they the ones with the ‘e ‘as in potatoes, potatoes with an e….and which US President was it that got it wrong – was it George Bush – yes I think it was – and I think he wrote it on the board… or did he correct a pupil’s spelling…’ and so on.
Until I reminded myself that I could just ‘stage’ the tomatoes and run, and in the event of a draw, it would be unlikely the result would be decided by vegetable Spelling Bee…..
Plus, despite my ’marquee memory meltdown’ I think I can safely say… given my unusually high personal average when it comes to making free with the word ‘tomatoes’ , I do know how it’s spelt.
But I did also pick up a couple of tips for next time…
- The calyx needs to be intact – to keep this fresh (if you are picking the tomatoes a few days before the show) place a damp tissue over the top of the tomato to cover it.
- The tomato should be detached from the plant so that the ‘knuckle’ is part of the cut stalk. In the tomatoes pictured ( not mine!), that’s the ‘bump’ you can see on each stalk.
- Some people use sand as a base on which to stand the tomatoes, but as this has a tendency to stick to the bottom of the tomato when it’s picked up for judging, black cloth, or black crepe paper which can be gently moulded around the base of each tomato maybe a better choice.
There’s much more ….but one ‘stage’ at a time !
