quest to Erebor day 18. the dwarves get bored and decide to have a ‘nicest beard’ contest. as the only non-bearded party member they decide Bilbo has to be the judge as he’s the only one able to be impartial.
unbeknownst to them Bilbo judges the Hobbiton pie-making contest AND best garden contest AND pumpkin growing contest every year. he spends 3 hours judging all their beards on various metrics including length, softness and fanciness. by the time he declares Balin the winner they’re all kind of tired of it.
Balin subsequently brings up his ‘objectively nicest beard’ at every opportunity tho.
when ppl outside the party question him on it he’s like ‘Mr Baggins said mine was the nicest and he judges the Hobbit best garden contest EVERY YEAR’.
no-one outside the party knows what the Hobbiton best garden contest is so they assume it’s something very important & that Mr Baggins must be someone important & influential in his own country, to be able to make those sorts of judgements, and are suitably impressed.
I mean, these are hobbits. the annual Best Garden Contest IS something Very Important!
somebody asks Bilbo about it and he answers, truthfully, that it’s one of the most important events of the Hobbiton social calendar and they’re like ah… that does sound important
The best garden contest is perhaps the most ruthless, cut-throat, and vicious contest in hobbitish culture. Families have been fractured, blood-feuds sworn, and casseroles thrown out to feed the pigs instead of eaten. It is Very Serious Business and Big Folk may sigh and shake their heads, but when it comes to gardening, it has been known for a Hobbit to take a tea-kettle and beat a goblin to death with it for daring uproot their award winning roses (that said Hobbit might have been Bilbo’s younges aunt, a Brandybuck now by marriage, was completely beside the point). You do not mess with the Gardening Contest, and more importantly, you don’t get caught messing with the contest either.
This is why Sam was able to walk all the way to Mordor with Frodo. Frodo may be the Ring Bearer ™ but Samwise Gamgee has won The Best Garden Competition 3 times in a row and Sauron himself is nowhere near as tough as that
