Not long now until our Summer Show. We’re delighted to be back in our usual venue in Rosemarkie after two years of disruption due to Covid, and we’re hoping for a good show of fruit, flowers and vegetables as well as baking, preserves, crafts and photos.

We’ve got some interesting new classes this year, and of course our Tub of Tatties competition, which will be judged in public at 2.15 on the day. Full details are available on the BIHS website http://www.spanglefish.com/blackislehorticulturalsociety/, where you can download the Schedule. We’re also posting information on our Facebook page.

Our very popular Cream teas will be back this year, and we want to encourage entries to the Botanical Illustration class that began last year. We also have a Novice section to encourage people who haven’t won a prize before to enter the Show.  If you know anyone this applies to, please let them know about it.

Download Show schedule  (14 page .doc file)

Previous information

The Schedule for our Summer Show on 13^th August is attached. Gardening has changed over the years, and we rightly think more about sustainability, seasonality and biodiversity. We’ve made some changes to our Schedule this year to reflect this, while keeping quality and skills in growing, baking, preserves, craft, and photography at the core of the Show.

There are some new classes in vegetables and fruit – for example a class for mangetout or snap peas, one for alpine or wild strawberries, and a special competition for growing a tub of tatties. We’ve removed the apple classes from our fruit section – the more we think about eating seasonally, the stranger it seems that we pick apples in August two months before they’re edible, put them on the show bench and then throw them in the compost. And you know how the ugliest tomato variety that wouldn’t normally get near the Show is often the one that tastes the best? Well, you can now enter it - we’ve got a class for a tomato judged entirely on taste!

We’ve still got a class for a patio container with flowers, but we’ve added one for a recycled container with flowers (cooking pot? lick bucket? welly boot? – use your imagination!). There’s also a class for a pot of Nasturtiums, flowers that aren’t usually seen at the Show but are popular with gardeners.

More people are growing wild flowers in their gardens, both because they’re beautiful and for the biodiversity benefits they bring. There are four new classes for cut wild flowers (grown in the garden, not collected from the wild) and two new wild flower photograph classes.  We’ve made some other changes in the Cut flower section as well. For example, if you grow begonias but find it difficult to get three or four flowers in good condition at the same time, you can now enter a single begonia bloom (if you’ve got three perfect ones you can still enter them too).

We’ve also made changes to the layout and content of the Schedule, intended to make it clearer and more accessible, including a guide to how the Show works. We hope you’ll like the changes we’ve made, and that they’ll encourage greater participation in the Show. And if you’ve got any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Graham Sullivan
Secretary, Black Isle Horticultural Society.