A suburban garden society's twenty-point preserves card, studied across nine autumn shows, is adopted as the rule for what its fete stall may sell.
A twenty-point judging card from one show bench becomes the stall's stocking rule, with no donated-jar exception
A jar of preserves must now score seventeen out of twenty before it may stand on one garden society’s fete stall. The rule is set out in Passed, Not Eaten, a research poster released today by the School of Continuous Improvement, with Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Dr Dagny Okafor and Dr Joost Nwosu as authors.
A card asks the same twenty questions of every jar, and it was a pleasure to see how willingly the jars began to answer.
— Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer
The poster follows the Society’s preserves class through nine autumn shows, taking the judges’ pads as its record. Over that period the card’s scores climbed and the benches settled on a single kind of jar. The Society’s committee has taken the result as the basis for a stocking rule: unsold passed jars are entered on the show register as “passed, held” and count toward the next year’s bench allocation, and the receiving table will test a jar’s set before it is accepted for judging at all. A second society is to be approached in time for the 2027 show.
The work draws on the School’s interest in how an agreed card travels from the bench to the shelf. Dr Nwosu said the show bench “has been generous in what it let us read”, and Dr Okafor welcomed the “good many questions about jars” that the work has left open. The release reflects the University’s long habit of finding a rule wherever it is shown a table.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ra6ivq.