Legend of the Green Stripy Badger

Who doesn’t love a giant vegetable? Show me the gardener who is unmoved by a prodigiously sized pumpkin and I’ll show you a giant fraud.

Large vegetables bring out the children in all of us, we immediately scale ourselves down alongside them and gaze at their size in wonder. However you can’t supersize every element of veg in the back garden and treat it with the same respect. There are only certain vegetables that are capable of inducing awe by their failure to stop at conventional dimensions.

Broad beans look lumpy and crude left to grow too big, courgettes like balloons that have been over-inflated. Spot one of these and the harvester knows they are going to get something woody and indigestible when they are finally picked. However melons, squashes and pumpkins hold the prospect of more of whatever you were going to get if you’d picked it a month earlier.

Leafing through the Thompson and Morgan seed catalogue it’s reassuring when you come across the seed packet for Dill’s Atlantic Giant pumpkins (left). It has a small child and its bowl-haircut sat on top of a giant orange pumpkin circa 1970. They haven’t changed it after all these years. I bought a packet from Woodstock Garden Centre in Surbiton just before it was superseded (sorry) by Squires. It was 10p a packet because the seeds were out of date – and the sew-by date on was about 2001. I never planted them because I never had the kind of John-Boy-Walton-sized pumpkin patch to do it justice, but I always wonder what that child looks like now. The Little Jimmy Osmond of the horticultural world.

But I digress what about marrows?

I’m always getting grief for planting too many courgettes every year and not enough broccoli. Or, to be strictly accurate, no broccoli. I get even more grief for planting marrows as well. “Nobody likes them,” is the trenchant view put forward, ignoring the fact that I like them. The crucial factor in the delivery of the veg schedule is that I find it hard to kill courgette seedlings and pigeons don’t peck them to pieces. They adore rocket and radishes and have taken a particular shine to pak-choi but they’re happy to ignore every variety of courgette, marrow and zucchini.

So inevitably I’m left with a lot of courgette plants and this year two marrows. I could only keep pace eating one of the marrow plants, so the other was left to become my show marrow, ‘the green stripy badger’. Without any prompting it levered itself onto the side of the raised bed and continued to add to its considerable weight.

I finally picked it in mid-September and the ceremony we normally use for weighing checked-in luggage was applied to the magnificent one. But then, mild disappointment. I was hoping to get into double figures but as the digital display blinked its definitive judgement, the read-out was… just 9kgs.

What could I do with my former beauty pageant entrant? Eat it, compost it, or maybe make an art installation out of it? The Turner Prize was once won one by ‘Shed-Boat-Shed’, which was an alpine shed, transformed into a boat and sailed down the river, and then made into a shed again. Which was clearly an outrageous fraud because no shed could ever be made waterproof. Shed-Raft-Shed, yes, but theyd idn’t call it that. But then if you think about it, outrageous fraud is the oeuvre of most Turner Prize entrants.

I had an idea I could hollow the green stripy badger out and make a canoe of it.

I would title this original piece ‘Marrow Boat’.

I’m working on it.