Tag Archives: rhubarb

Rhubarb Is Ready

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I have been away from the blog this past week as other things have taken precedence. We have enjoyed visits from two groups of guests. I has been a delight to show them around our town and the surrounds.

Here are a couple of photos taken from the summit of Mt Tarrengower which overlooks the town.

An almost full moon as we looked east towards the town.

Sunset in the opposite direction.

Our house guests of the past few days departed this morning so I need to get back to some food prep and meal planning. The first step was to cut a generous handful of rhubarb from one of the clumps which are happily growing near the back fence. We usually have some stewed fruit on our cereal each morning so I chopped and stewed the stalks and have containers of stewed rhubarb ready to go in the freezer.

Flowers and Food

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Late autumn is well and truly upon us and in fact the apparent temperature at 7am this morning was -0.3C. This is the first time I have seen it dip below 0C this year. However, it is beautiful and sunny with a forecast maximum of 18C today so it seemed like a good time to head out to the garden and get stuck into some jobs.

First up was planting the sweet peas which I had nurtured from seed. They had been outdoors overnight for the past couple of weeks to acclimatise and harden off before planting.

There was a fish pond in the back garden when we moved here last year. Actually, our first year anniversary in this house was last Friday. Anyway, the fish pond has been dismantled and the area is going to be a herb garden. However, I have seconded a strip at the back for the sweet peas. The main reason is because there is a paling fence with chicken wire on the inside which will be a perfect trellis for the sweet peas.

Next were the lettuce seedlings which had come up self-sown from some plants that went to seed last year. I have about 30 of varying sizes. I will keep some and plan to sell some punnets of lettuce seedlings at the next LETS market.

Last weekend I bought a large pot containing several rhubarb crowns from LETS. I divided them today and added to the single rhubarb plant which I have had for several months. This bed will hopefully become an abundance of rhubarb in time.

Finally, the brassica seedlings seem to be almost doubling in size overnight. I have now covered this bed with fine netting to keep the would-be predators away.

I am happy with what I achieved in a couple of hours this morning and look forward to reaping the rewards of food to eat and beautiful flowers in the coming months.

The Garden Grows

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After being away for six weeks, the vegetable garden was in need of some attention.

I cleared out the remains of the broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower which had been harvested while we were away.  There are now corn, lettuce, radish and cucumber seeds planted in the spaces available.

The area inside the fence that I had earmarked for a herb garden is now sporting a couple of very healthy  parsley plants as well as several basil seedlings.  I planted these on the weekend as they were kindly left for us by the house sitters.  They commented that it was cheaper to buy a pot of seedlings than a bunch of parsley or basil.

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I have previously shown you here the netting that we bought at the Garden Show and we intended to ask the house sitters to put it on the peach tree as I felt it would need to be done while we were away.  That did not happen so now all of our small, green peaches are enclosed.  If this is successful, in a few months we will be harvesting luscious peaches that have not been stung by fruit fly. I can only hope!

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Before we went away we planted the asparagus and rhubarb in styrofoam boxes until I could prepare the areas where we wanted to plant them.  On the weekend we dug a trench and set the concrete blocks into the ground to form a border for the rhubarb.  I hope to plant some flowers in the small soil-filled pockets of the blocks.

I hope to prepare the bed for the asparagus in the coming weeks.

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We have a long weekend coming up and I am hoping to get some more done in the garden.