Disorganised Chaos.

Today was our local Agricultural and Craft show, and like so many things in Ireland it is best described as chaos. Although it opens at 8am for exhibitors to display their entries, at 9am half the shelving was not even in place, and what was in place made little sense.
 Baskets of  vegetables were allocated a space of eight sq.ft for all the exhibits, on the same table as Turf  which had sixteen sq ft ( there were only two entries)

We grow lots of different herbs, but Sage Rosemary and parsley won out.

and then eight sq ft for kitchen herbs, why I ask myself was turf on the same table as edibles, maybe because you need turf to cook your food, I'm sure there is some logic there although it misses me completely. Still like so many things here it was alright on the night, or rather day. We came away with ten firsts,

Ours are the ones with the blue card.

one second, ( our onions came second to four slightly larger ones but they had soft necks) and two thirds. I was very pleased to get three firsts for our flowers,

one was a table arrangement, one miniature arrangement and one for our Dahlias, and four out of five firsts for my jams.

I was especially pleased to get a first in the craft section for my Faberge egg.
What we both found surprising was the cheating! The rules state that produce and flowers must be grown by the exhibitor, yet there were lettuce clearly straight from Lidl, the type that are grown together in a square cube that you put in water to keep fresh, they received second prize, well done Lidl! Flowers must be from your own garden, again several displays came straight from  a florist shop, the flowers I mean rather than the arrangement. I wonder if this sort of thing happens in the UK, I know it didn't used to. I cant see the point in entering any competition if it's not from your own effort. 
All in all it was a good day and well worth doing from a financial point of view, no doubt the money will be spent on the garden.

All in all a good result.