Titanarum

Rhubarb. I love it. Been given stalks by allotment neighbours. Beautiful stuff. Am stewing it with some sugar and having it with vanilla suffused custard or rice pudding. The next bunch will go into a crumble. I do have my own rhubarb plant but it’s a late one. Right now all I can see is a cluster of vibrant red knobs ready to burst into leaf. Give it a few more weeks and I should be able to start picking. Also doing well is the sprouting broccoli. Have only had a few stems so far as the fat pigeons beat me until recently. Now that the plants have adequate protection (chicken wire) the little stems are sprouting from every node. I should have half a kilo of the stuff by the weekend. Will definitely grow them again. And lastly. Praise the powers that be for flat leaf parsley. It has survived all winter and its fragrance and flavour do me proud. And the chives… I cut the first cluster of the year down to a number one and mixed the finely cut bits into a smoked mackerel and thick yoghurt mousse. Divine. I have about half a dozen clusters, enough to keep me in going and then some.

Can you believe it? 3 weeks have passed and not a word from me? Absence makes the heart grow fonder they say? Not in my case. Winter in the UK is rubbish for people who like to grow things. And my heart doesn’t grow anymore. Neither fonder, sillier, or sorrier. I’m a middle aged disaffected blogger not some poet dishing out metaphors for this that and the other. Like other gardeners I call a spade exactly that. And no more. Unless it turns out to be a crap spade. In that case I don’t, as you can see, abstain from the odd adjective. But as for posting my thoughts on growing this time of the year…. Well, I have tried. I had a hyacinth in the window sill, didn’t I? And what a disappointment that turned out to be. A compacted little thing that had a hint of scent for few days before turning brown. And as for the freesias, I’d rather not go there. Still, now I’ve started I might as well. I went against thousands of botanists and specialist growers and planted my little bulbs two months early. Then I placed them exactly where they wouldn’t thrive this time of year: in a south facing window with constant heat wafting from a radiator below. And my giving the little buggers too much heat for the amount of light we have available this time of year has resulted in weak growth and brown spots on the leaves. So there. I was wrong. Get over it.