For the Holland Marsh, with its rural and agricultural roots, one of the highlights of the annual Royal Agricultural Winter Fair is the Giant Vegetable Show.
The biggest, the longest, the tallest, the heaviest vegetables are entered, with hopes of achieving a ‘Royal Best’ record, if not a world record.
This year, King Township’s Joanne Borcsok once again dominated the competition, to win the Grand Champion Giant Vegetable Exhibitor Award.
Not only did she place first in 10 categories, second in three categories, and third in three categories, her winning entries often set a Royal Best.
Borcsok took first in Red Beet Root by weight at 4.2 lbs., Cabbage by weight with a whopping 32.6 lb. monster (a Royal Best), Ornamental flowering Cabbage or Kale at 22 ¾ inches in diameter – another Royal Best; Carrot Root by length (53 inches), Parsnip Root by length at a remarkable 84.7 inches (yet another Royal Best), Parsnip Root by weight at 6.2 lbs., and Sunflower Head by diameter, setting a Royal Best at 24 ¼ inches.
She also had the tallest sunflower stalk by height – 14 ft. 7 in., corn stalk by height at 22 ft. 11 in., and biggest field pumpkin by weight, at 87.8 lbs. Her entry in the Giant Pumpkin Challenge placed 6th.
It weighed a mere 309.2 lbs.
Borcsok credits the help she gets from the farm’s Mexican guest workers, for providing the extra manpower needed to grow and prepare all of the exhibits. She also credits the late Frank Weening.
Weening was a regular exhibitor at the Vegetable Show at the Royal, winning prizes with his onion ropes and other displays.
“He stopped by the farm one time and said, Joanne, why don’t you do a fair?” remembers Borcsok. “He got me into this!”
This year has been a tough year for growers in the Holland Marsh. Borcsok and her husband Karoly still have both onions and carrots in the field, as a result of wet conditions.
Planting was delayed in the spring, due to wet weather. “It was a lake. We had 50 geese, we had 10 swans, we had everything but onions,” said Joanne. And conditions are still too wet to harvest acres of carrots, hopefully protected under the snow.
The Royal isn’t the only fair that the Borcsoks enter. They brought three pick-up loads of vegetables to the Woodbridge Fair – where Joanne took 50 firsts.
