Nan thought about that for a moment and then chuckled. “I guess they didn’t think about that when they left it there, did they?”
“I think that wasn’t a top priority for them at the time,” she said. “You should have seen it. I swear we had close to a dozen men here.”
“I believe it,” Nan said. “It’s that old community spirit we used to have but seems to have been lost for a long time now.”
“Right,” she said.
“But I’m really glad that you managed to find that spirit again.”
“Me too,” Doreen said.
As soon as Nan was gone, Doreen looked at the name on her pad of paper and then looked up a phone number. She should have checked with Nan for one, but she hadn’t offered it to her and was acting so odd about this whole conversation. Better that Doreen found the number herself. Apparently there was even a website, and who knew there was a Kelowna fair in the first place? Doreen got a hold of one of the organizers, who then passed on the number for Candace. When Doreen got a hold of Candace, she was quite affable and cheerful about the whole fair-festival contest thing.
“I arrange for the judges in each category,” she said. “And honestly the competition is quite fierce.”
“Meaning that a lot of really high-end gardeners are in town?” Doreen asked in surprise.
“Absolutely, and they’re all very protective of their methodologies and the little tricks and tips that they have,” she said with a laugh. “Now the tomatoes are always a big fight because it’s hard to judge the flavor of a tomato. Everybody’s got their own special things that they like, whether it’s robust or juicy or firm or fleshy. You know? There’s just so many different characteristics. So we generally do it by size. The same thing goes for the largest pumpkins. We have the largest zucchinis contest. We have the largest squashes contest. And, of course, now they’re doing megacarrots too, so we have the longest carrots with the best tone and color. It’s all very competitive. You don’t realize how much people get into this until you join something like this event and realize it’s serious business for them.”
“Right,” Doreen said. “That’s amazing. Even tropical plants?”
“That’s always been a bit of a difficult one,” she said, “because what constitutes a tropical plant? We had a list, and then the list kept expanding, as people would say, I’m growing this or I’m growing that. So it’s pretty wide open, and it does cause a bit of kerfuffle at the end of the day.”
“And yet I understand somebody with kiwis has won every time?”
“Indeed,” Candace said. “And you have to admit, with kiwis, you can grow them down on the coast, but we have kiwis, passion fruit, bananas …” And her voice trailed off as she was lost in thought. “I can’t remember the list of acceptable fruits,” she said. “But the kiwis have been the biggest, roundest, juiciest, and sweetest fruits you can imagine,” she said enthusiastically. “Also the most contentious winners in any category.”
“But isn’t that like comparing apples to oranges?” Doreen asked in confusion.
“And we’ve had that argument several times,” the woman said with a heavy sigh. “And again, the contenders get quite irate about it. So we made it very clear that these were the fruits that could be entered, and then they had to go up against each other.”
“Well, I guess it’s fair, as long as people understand what they’re up against,” Doreen said, wondering how anybody would find any of this comfortable to deal with.
“Well, it doesn’t matter if it’s fair or not,” she said. “We do the best we can, but there will always be dissenters.”
“Has anybody ever said the kiwi winner wasn’t fair?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “All the time. It’s quite irritating too because we have this point-counting system, where it’s judged by its color and its size comparative to, you know, kiwis growing in its own native country, blah, blah, blah. But honestly, so far, Marsha Langford has done an absolutely lovely job with those kiwis. She gets premium price for them, and, every year, she keeps winning.”
“Has anybody else been close?”
“Yes, yes, of course. We’ve had a couple passion fruits that have been grown in greenhouses, but then they were disqualified because of that,” she said apologetically. “We make it very clear that this isn’t a greenhouse competition because that changes things completely.”
Doreen frowned, trying to figure out how that would change anything. “So, it has to be grown out of doors, and that’s about it?”
“Out-of-doors locally and you can start it from a seed indoors. You can start it in a greenhouse too, but it has to be moved outside,” the woman said. “We do have a list on the website if you’re that interested.”
“Well, it is interesting,” she said. “I understand Rosie was one of the kiwi fanatics.”
“Well, the problem is, once Marsha won all the kiwi contests for a couple years, everybody else tried to grow kiwis too. Some people were calling her a cheat and things like that,” she said. “And it did get pretty ugly last year.”
“How could she have cheated?”
“Well, that was one of the things that the judges were confused about. But apparently the argument was that she had grown them in large pots and then had kept them in the greenhouse well past the point that they were allowed, and, by the time she moved them out for the competition, they’d already come to the fruiting stage, and so it was cheating.”
“And yet did you guys check that out?”
“Well, not really,” she said. “This is supposed to be all in fun, and, of course, the minute you start having winners, you end up having losers. And, in this case, it ended up being sore losers.”
“And how were they sore losers?”
“Well, they had kiwis,” she said, “but they weren’t anywhere near as fat and as plump as the ones the winner had.”
“Right. So then professional jealousy
