Rhubarb Appreciation Society

[Blackpuddingbertha]

Going with Rhihaf's thread name suggestion, following on from the first rule of gardening club is thread.

Pull up your kneeling pads, crack open the elderberry wine and the blackberry gin and come and join us. No real experience or gardening know-how needed.

If anyone wants some vinca, I have two types (major, minor) that I can easily take up some suckers from. Also I have rasp/logan/tayberries which have put out a lot of suckers, I don't know how long it takes for them to be productive but I don't like to throw anything away...!

Did some good weeding out the back today, first cut of the lawn, top dressed my big herb pots (actually the boy did that, useful little thing he is turning out to be!). No sign of any action from the beans/peas I sowed in the canvas raised beds, but I have a little row of turnip seedlings in a trough which we will eat small and sweet, and I may sow some other veg direct this weekend in the ground.

I have a mountain to climb with weeding the front garden. The horsetail has just started to come through so I'll be grumbling about nothing else from now on. I have luscious growth on comfrey and sweet rocket, which I need to keep in check (i.e. in the right place) but I like them both. I may use weedkiller on the large crop of dandelions on my neighbour's paved front patch, before he uses weedkiller and sprays it through onto my nice plants.

Hope the home visit goes well for your mum, Wynken. ::hugs::

Anyone any good with trees?

I have put a photo on my profile of a tree in my front garden. It is a lovely tree but i have no idea what it is and if i should be prunning it or not. I dont want to make any mistakes and for it to lose its shape.

All the cherry blossom out this way too funnyperson. I have been boring my running partner for the last month by oohing and aahing at trees and plants and front garden designs! There are some great old houses in the suburb next to me where we do our interval runs ? proper big Dutch houses, probably all listed, with painted shutters, high windows and flagpoles. Have just been chatting to DH and he told me that our house used to have shutters a looong time ago. He?s going to dig out some photos for me of the garden and house. Has been in DH?s family since at least 1950 (belonged to his grandparents who sold it to DH in the 90s, DFIL grew up here). I know that the back garden used to be twice as big and mostly used for vegetables. (pretty bug now by Dutch standards ? we have 230 square metres out back including garage)

Beautiful weather here today. We?ve spent the whole day outside. DBIL and DSIL dropped off DN?s (5 and 8) for a couple of hours while they ran some errands. They were swinging in the hammock, playing hide and seek, and ?Indian and animals to be hunted? (perhaps inspired by DS?s wigwam play tent!) while they impatiently waited for DS (18mo)to wake up from his nap so they could play with him. Was lovely hearing them play. DBIL and DSIL came back to get them and they wanted to stay so they went off without them to do some more shopping and left the boys playing for a bit more.

Have done some weeding of the drive to prep for new gravel today and laid the slate stepping stones in properly. DH sowed some seeds ? delphiniums, some rock garden plants and parsley.

Finished the gardening day off with a nice cold beer in the sunshine Happy days

of sweet peas echt. Have planted some more as my first round was a disaster. Double at Booktown. I?ve never been to Hay ? as an English teacher this is nothing short of a tragedy

Rhubarb sounds yummy Tynefilth. I put in a tiny plant a few years ago and it still hasn?t grown enough to eat any!

Hope all goes well tomorrow for you and your mum wynken

I gave up on the rhubarb for this year. next year with proper snail defences and without frost...

may I pull up a trug and join?

my garden is small, but I am very fond of it and spend much time daydreaming planning what I will never get round to may do one day.

I have a gravel & grasses front garden, and I am adding scented and aromatic plants to it. At the back I have put in a couple of apple trees and some geraniums on one side, and I need to revamp a big tangled old honeysuckle hedge on the other side. I have a little wildlife pond that I love, but the tadpoles all seem to have disappeared - I hope they are still there. The newts have come back.

I am currently cursing slugs and snails. They have had all my sweet peas. All of them. Greedy bloomin' molluscs.

hello iheartdusty

I will join you in cursing the slugs. They are munching up the clematis. Glad you have newts in your pond, I would love to have newts in the garden.

I had a really lovely day today. The DC turned up and the vegetable trough got planted. Spent most of the day eating and pottering and chatting in the garden together.

I had a dream the other night that I trained the slugs and snails to tend to the lawn, keeping it nice and leaving the other plants to grow...

spoke to fil this afternoon who used to be a builder (=grubby hands) he said that he 'washed' his hands with bodylotion before washing with soap. will try that next time I have black fingernails.

Welcome on board, iheartdusty. Not many slugs where I am, but lots of snails, so I'll be watching what happens with the sweet peas. No, the buggers here are the possums, chomping away on all my native climbers. Furry gits.

Put some manure on the rhubarb which took a hammering in the summer, and next summer I'll get an old golf umbrella for it when it gets to 35. I planted two strawberries and cream hydrangeas at the back of a shady border, they'll lift that corner in the summer, when the clivias' flowers are over.

I'm sitting here now, typing with my filthy hands, and pondering all the good advice that I should have paid attention to before I started the garden work. Oh well.:o

I dont know why we never have as many slugs, perhaps because the birds are up so early singing and eating them all!
Good point about putting manure on the rhubarb.
I have loads to go in today- all the potted up delphinium seedlings need to take their chance, plus some plugs of anchuga, salvia, verbena bonariensis, more clematis, cosmos purity, various bargain lilies and convallaria; some of the roses need to go in the beds. Then, I think, apart from the cerinthe and echinacea, I am done planting for the year. I hope I get some flowers.
Hay is a pretty little place, or was years ago when I cycled there (it is very good cycling country) and a book lovers heaven. Though nowadays loads of perfectly good books are to be seen at the nearest Barnados because people have bought Kindles.

Hi iheartdusty. Feel your pain, so e bastard snail ate my new clematis and didn't have the good manners to move off afterwards.

I love the idea of Echt's Rhubarb having it's own brolly.

Yesterday was a major garden success. On top of what I found for the new border I also manged to get 4 pieces of Hebe with root which are now dotted around the place and two mini roses from my Fairy Rose (or something like that) plus a bit of Butterfly Blue scabious. Plus my lilac sucker from neighbours tree is growing well and hopefully on course to be trained into a standard in a few years.

Looking at the new border this morning I think I might have slightly over optimistic as to what I can fit in there for the tiny space it is, realistically it will just fit the Fatsia when it's grown. In the greenhouse I've pricking out Rudbeckia and Schizanthus seedlings plus have quite a lot of Cosmos. I'm going to have a final hack at the sedums and pot up a bit ready for when the new border is extended. I want to put it next to Rudbeckia foe some Autumn colour. My special offer perennials have turned out to be Foxglove, Coreopsis, Cat Mint and Geums, they are all coming along nicely.

At the front there's a lovely clematis called Early Sensation that I want to take cuttings of but failed on previous attempts. Had anyone had any luck with clematis cuttings and can give me tips ? Thinking about it I can probably take Mum's if she moves, it got frosted but survived and is still fairly small. Would be nice to have it, we went shopping together for them. Actually she's got a conifer, a sprawling horizontal one which she said my Aunt gave her in her old house and that she took a cutting for this house. Is it possible to take conifer cuttings ?

Having boasted about my dog not trampling plants, I've discovered he has been; a spot in a raised bed directly under the point where possums leave our roof and jump onto next door's tea-tree. I wondered why some ground cover - bergenia mostly - hadn't taken. I've put a very low wire fence (about 1 foot) around the bed. He's pathetically respectful of boundaries, so this might restrain him. We'll see.

On the other hand I'd been giving him tremendous bollockings after a spate of digging, only to find out it was the cat who, tiny as she is, digs poo pits as if she was mining uranium in the Plibara.

I don't know why I haven't had them boiled up for glue.:o

Pets in gardens are part of the family. We had rabbits who had the run of the garden (when we were in it) and it was a fun evening task to catch the rabbit(s) and put it(them) in the hutch for the night, and the DC, when little, invariably (and with rabbit co operation) prolonged the time it took.

When we had a cat, it similarly had to be called in every night: its name was the sanskrit for 'truth' so I felt very erm...intellectual and monastic.....calling out 'truth truth' every evening in sanskrit.

The hedgehog liked classical music, particularly Poulenc, and on cue when the oboe was played, would arrive at the back step for milk and water.

Pet poo has no place in the garden in my view. However those who use chicken shit etc have my empathy as clearly chicken shit has its uses.

Lexy's Wildlife Moment (I'd call it springwatch but I want there to be bugs and birds longer than that!!) today has included a frisky pair of Orange Tip butterflies dancing all around my garden, a Holly Blue passing through at speed, and a Brimstone (I think). In the front garden (the chaotically weed covered one) I have now twice seen it absolutely infested with sparrows, which is great because they apparently have lost a lot of habitat and whatever they like about my garden is a total accident.

sitting on my new deck furniture drinking iced peppermint tree...
life is good.

Hello Iheartdusty.

I am rather jealous hearing of all the seedlings being raised on here. I am longing to get this garden planted up with nice plants, and the borders widened, and a pergola built... So hard waiting a year. There have already been some nice surprises though, considering I thought the garden consisted only of overgrown shrubs and an embarrassment of conifers. We have some quality tulips, it turns out, and masses of primroses. I love primroses. I discovered a particularly pretty rhododendron flowering behind the garage today, almost completely swamped by yet more bloody snow berries. The rampant snow berries are a bit of a nightmare.

I did some intensive border edging today, and re-set the brick paths through dd's circular bed as they were a bit wonky in places. I wanted to dig over more of it but then I heard that there was free prosecco and home made ice cream on the village green, so that was the end of it.

Cantspel can you put up a close up photo of the leaves of your tree? It's difficult to identify it from the pic you've posted - they come up so small on here.

Hello Iheartdusty (Springfield, I presume).

I, in my turn, am jealous of anyone who lives in the kind of place where free prosecco and ice cream are handed out on the village green!

"The hedgehog liked classical music, particularly Poulenc"

The above may be the finest single phrase ever written on MN. This is why I wanted to join the thread.

Oh yes, we are very erudite here.

Welcome iheartdusty. We have a better class of hedgehog on this thread

I planted out some squashes and courgettes today as they were starting to get flowers starting in their little pots in the conservatory. Will have watch the weather closely and cloche if any sign of frost.

Maud, it is a very idyllic village, and I love it. It is so very very different from the corner of south London we moved here from . Today I felt like I'd wandered onto a Cath Kidston/Kirsty Allsop set; such were the hay bales and bunting. I need to remember this as I await permission to prune my bay trees.

I liked the hedgehog oboe moment too.

I will take some better photos tomorrow. We need mn hq to sort out this board so we can post decent sized photos in our posts as it would make identifying things so much easier.

Where did you move from, rhubarb? We might have been neighbours!

I chewed some fresh rhubarb from its pot today, thinking of you as a child, rhubarbgarden.
Yes, iheartdusty the hedgehog was magical and funny at the same time, with its snuffly snout, but I think it was a very special hedgehog as there hasn't been another like it since.

Aren't the days sublime at the moment?
Planted out dahlias, delphiniums(grown from seed), convallaria, astrantia, white foxgloves, clematis marie boisselot today, and divided up the totally overgrown cyclamen hederifolium, and potted on some plugs. I will have plants left over to go in mum and dad's garden, which I am feeling pleased about, otherwise I have been feeling guilty at being so happy in my garden.
I love the holly blue butterfly lexi Tynefilth- yours has come early: I havent seen any in the garden yet this year. I hope every one has a lovely bank holiday tomorrow.