Our friendly local Show has been running for over 60 years, and a spectacular and attractive display greets visitors when the Hall opens on Saturday afternoon. Most entries and visitors come from the Black Isle, with some from further afield. Often, people come to the Show as visitors, think that they’ve got something better than a winning exhibit in their own garden, and enter the following year. In 2022 we welcomed lots of new exhibitors who'd read about the Show on Facebook, came along and said "I've never entered a Show before, but I've grown this and think it's really good." We were delighted to help them display their exhibits. It’s good fun and not as daunting as you might think.
The Show isn’t all about giant onions and perfect dahlias (although we do have those). Most people who enter have ordinary gardens or allotments, grow flowers that look nice and reasonable-looking veg, or make tasty jam, and want to put them into the Show. There are classes for Cut Flowers, Pot Plants, Fruit, Vegetables, Baking, Preserves, Crafts, and Photographs. We've also got a section for under 14s, a Novice section for people who haven't entered or won before, and a relatively new class for Botanical Illustration. As well as being a competition, the Show is a great opportunity to meet other gardeners and bakers, compare notes and pick up tips. We also have some of the best Cream Teas around, served outside on the lawn!
You can see full details, including all the classes that can be entered in the show, in the Show Schedule. The Schedule for 2023 will be posted here when it's produced sometime in February.
Gardening has changed over the years, and we rightly think more about sustainability, seasonality and biodiversity. We made some changes to our Schedule in 2022 to reflect this, while keeping quality and skills in growing, baking, preserves, craft, and photography at the core of the Show. Some of the changes are described below.
We added 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 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!
More people are growing wild flowers in their gardens, both because they’re beautiful and for the biodiversity benefits they bring. We added new classes for cut wild flowers (grown in the garden, not collected from the wild) and for wild flower photographs.
We 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.