Currently housed in Dublin, Virginia, it’s been around for 63 years.
We’d never entered produce in the competition there until this year.
🥇Lured in by the chance at $8 prize money per blue ribbon, JP couldn’t resist.
You have to know some things about JP to appreciate this. He is ultra-competitive. Think college-athlete-bound competitive mixed with vegetable farmer. Everything’s a contest. That’s JP.
What did that mean? It meant he spent two full days, combing (and recombing) through all his gardens and fretting over which exact vegetable specimens to enter at the fair, for the win, and in which categories.
He tortured me with speculative questions for days.
🤔Would his haricot vert green beans have a better chance of winning over green bush beans?
Should his miscellaneous vegetable entry be his sleek purple eggplant or exotic baby ginger?
What were my true feelings about his jalapeno peppers?
I had to cut him off.
We made two trips to Dublin and had 47 produce entries at the end of it.
We spent over $200 attending the fair itself (unlimited ride wristbands for the fam + the kid buddy, corndogs, funnel cakes, fair games, etc).
We had a blast.
How’d he do, you ask?
Now, to be fair (get it?), JP extends nearly all the credit to our top-notch veggie crew.
And he did consider for a millisecond protesting the categories he didn’t nail (competition was pretty cutthroat for basil).
But for 47 entries, he took home 41 ribbons for his veggies. Not bad, I told him.
Now, it’s not bragging if you can back it up.
Though he feigns modesty most of the time, JP is dying to back it up for you.
So, here’s how his babies placed at the 2025 New River Valley Fair produce competition:
| 1st place acorn squash baby ginger (for most unusual produce) banana peppers beets buttercrisp lettuce (for misc lettuce) butternut squash cabbage carrots (of course!) cayenne pepper cherry peppers delicata squash (for misc produce) eggplant (for misc vegetable) ground cherries (most unusual vegetable) home gardeners special (veggie decathlon where you submit a basket of 10+ of your best veggies) jack-o-lantern pumpkin kale lettuce, green frills (for leaf-type lettuce) melons onion, red patty pan potatoes, red sage Swiss chard tomato, largest tomato, red slicer tomato, yellow | 2nd place cilantro (for misc herb) green beans jalapeno onions, white onions, yellow potatoes, Kennebec potatoes, yukon gold sweet Italian pepper (for misc peppers) tomato Cherokee purple (for misc tomato) tomato, roma yellow squash zucchini | 3rd place bell pepper haricot vert (for misc green beans) cherry tomatoes (for tomatoes, small novel) |
😁Oh, and I’ll mention that I got a blue ribbon for brown eggs and a red ribbon for duck eggs, too.
We enjoy growing award-winning food for you!
Now taking sign-ups for our Winter Veggie Share.