Midway Moments: O.C. Fair’s fruit and vegetable contests are ones to beet

Under the watchful eye of scarecrows and the occasional piercing call of a peacock, Mary Potempa paced around a tent at the Orange County fairgrounds’ Centennial Farm carrying a clipboard Tuesday morning, taking note of the best, the biggest and the bizarre of the fair’s fruit and vegetables.

Hobbyist gardeners bring their finest specimens — whether they be textbook examples or one of a kind — for weekly contests held throughout the fair’s month-long run in Costa Mesa.

The best-of-show winners are taste-tempting. The most unusual, with odd colors and shapes, are memorable.

There were no freak leeks Tuesday, but there were several curved zucchini, a Japanese eggplant that had grown into a coil shape, several massive, multi-stemmed beets and a tomato that, as Potempa put it, “looks like a warp in space and time.”

The tomato, a bulbous wad of red and green, is a reisetomate, an heirloom variety that typically grows as a cluster of small fruits. But with its irregular segments and seam-like scars, this one perhaps looks like it’s pushing through a sieve separating dimensions.

Potempa said the grower’s boyfriend called it “creepy” as the couple dropped it off that morning for judging. “He’s glad they got rid of it,” she said.

Other entries in this week’s contest, however, looked pretty friendly: A tiny golden bouquet of nasturtium, a type of edible flower, from Buena Park. A fragrant onion with a long, braided stem from Irvine. Glossy, deep purple pluots (plum/apricot hybrids) from Santa Ana. Firm green jujube fruits from Fountain Valley. Hefty Armenian cucumbers, dainty blueberries, crinkly kale and chard with brilliant magenta stalks. And a couple of pumpkins that could double as ottomans.

Judge Joe Ott, a one-time competitor who grows cherry tomatoes and pumpkins in his Huntington Beach yard, said you never really know what’s going to show up, but one species is typically a good performer.

“Usually the beets get pretty crazy,” he said.

Fellow judge Brian Danker explained that not all beets left in the soil will die. Some will just keep growing, and another will grow atop it, and so on, as they fuse until they resemble a fibrous, lumpy car battery.

In addition to time spent underground, an unusual specimen can result from how they’re pollinated, an obstruction — say, a fence post — that forces them to develop in a different shape, or simply — as what makes humans unique — genes.

Danker has judged the fair’s fruit and vegetable contests for more than 20 years. In his professional life, he worked for the Orange County agricultural commissioner, which enforces quality control standards. That is to say he’s highly qualified to scrutinize citrus and pore over peppers.

But the county fair is a friendly competition, he said as he tucked a judging slip under a giant butternut squash with an outsize neck that made it look like an edible alphorn — that long wooden horn famous in the Alps.

Organizers try to keep the contests relaxed and fun. They don’t use a scale for the largest specimens — they eyeball them — and they will remember repeat entrants to help spread the ribbons around, Danker said.

Green thumbs have three more opportunities to enter their produce, with several classes to include “other.” There is a separate division for young growers.

For more details, head to ocfair.com/howtoenter/howtoenterhoney-plants and click on “Fruit & Vegetables.”

Editor’s note: Midway Moments is a recurring column chronicling the Orange County Fair.

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