CLUB NEWS Leigh Discussion Club We very much regret that the COVID-19 pandemic has curtailed our programme for the foreseeable future. Our summer and autumn talks and events have been cancelled, as has our annual Christmas meal. We will do our best to keep you all informed of our future plans and we hope that we may be able to resume our activities in the New Year. Our intention is to book the speakers who had to be cancelled because of the pandemic. Mick Harris Chairman
Yetminster & Ryme Garden, Art and Craft Society The Potato in a Bag Competition goes from strength to strength! The Garden Club may have had no meetings, no outings and no parties since lockdown began in March but one event in its calendar was unstoppable. Throughout these troubled times members have been watering and feeding their precious Charlotte potato in its black bag, hoping that a crop of prizewinning proportions was growing unseen beneath the compost. And Saturday 1 August was the day of reckoning. A record 15 members in all delivered their bags and then spread out on the grass outside the Jubilee Hall to watch while the weighing took place. After such a socially-deprived few months, this was a rare excitement for a lot of us as each bag was emptied, and the potatoes weighed and counted. Local hero John Burt acted again as judge with his usual assistants Robin
Debell and John Ferretter making sure that even the smallest potato was not overlooked. There were two impressive winners this year. Elizabeth Jubb’s potatoes weighed in at 1545gms, an overall weight which beat the nearest entry by 260gms and she quite rightly won a bottle of good champagne for that achievement. The prize for growing the largest potato went to Phil Legge who managed to produce a 338gm specimen, which beat the next entry by a sizeable 104gms, which provided him with a big smile and a bottle of wine. It was brilliant that so many people joined in and took part in the event. And it didn’t matter if you won or if you didn’t, it was all a bit of much-needed fun and was proof, as if we needed it, that the spirit of the Garden Club is surviving, albeit underground (like the potatoes!), and is ready to be resurrected when times change for the better. Judy Ferretter 47
