Rhubarb rising

Crimson knobs emerge. Then pale, crinkled leaves slowly unfurl. Cherry-red stalks begin to elongate. The rhubarb is on the march!

Last year I divided the one clump we had (acquired originally as a give-away left on a street corner) into three or four sections, discarding the dead fibrous center. I feed each with a nice helping of manure and, reinvigorated, the plants responded with a burst of growth. Rhubarb loves nutrient-rich soil, the richer the better. It’s no surprise that the new plant that has come on the most is the one planted next to the compost heap.

This year I may employ an upturned, black plastic garbage can to plunge one of these rhubarb clusters into artificial darkness. Deprived of light, the stalks will grow tall (seeking the sun) but remain rosily pink and tender. The leaves, unable to photosynthesize, will remain pale yellow and wrinkled. In this manner, I will produce “forced rhubarb” – a delicacy prized in the late winter months. After this early harvest, the bucket is taken off and the plant suffers no lasting effects, though it must not be forced again for several years.

Have you ever eaten poached rhubarb (roasted in the oven with a scattering of vanilla sugar and some freshly squeezed orange juice)? Sweet and tender and stunningly ruby-red.

Before the majority of spring bulbs are in bloom, rhubarb offers the vegetable gardener a vibrant, colorful display that heralds spring.

Winter Respite

Last week, from a train window, I gazed at snow coating the fields, reflecting cold light back onto a grey, February sky. A classic winter scene. When I arrived in Oxford, the snow was nowhere to be found, though the air remained frosty and the impressive college architecture seemed to echo a seasonally-approriate chilly solemnity.

The highlight of this quick day trip was certainly the opportunity to meet and catch up with sister-in-law Kate! A wonderful, and all-too-brief, treat.

Afterwards, I wandered down High Street to find the University’s Botanic Garden. Many plants in the outdoor beds were still sleeping, but harbingers of spring provided elegant splashes of color.

Snowdrops

A distinctly unseasonal treat awaited me inside the glass houses where warm, moist air enveloped leafy fronds of jungle foliage –

Where crops were ready to harvest –

Cotton plant

And ripe fruit (in season?) tempted the passerby.

In the next room, dry heat (equally exotic) bathed cacti and aloes of all shapes and sizes –

I thoroughly enjoyed the brief encounter with exotic climes – just a short train journey away. Now back to ordering and chitting potatoes and pruning fruit bushes. Spring is coming!

Plumbing the depths, then rising to new heights

Ringing in the New Year – with a new, and exhilarating, ramble.

Two more wonderful winter walks punctuated the end of 2012 and the start of 2013.

The first, an annual holiday tradition cherished by the girls, saw us donning our wellies on Christmas day to squelch over the sodden fields to the old Saxon mill – turned pub – for festive hot chocolates, mulled cider, and a local beer on draft for Dad. A short walk over well-known, and very muddy, terrain. Not particularly exciting, one would think, undertaken more out of ritual habit than any particular expectation of revelation. But the heavy rains that transformed the fields into brown ooze had also swelled the River Avon. The flood waters poured over the elevated path that led to the pub and suddenly our walk became an exciting adventure.

Flood waters spread beyond the river’s banks, rushing over the elevated walkway to the mill. Isobel turns for a moment, unsure of whether we can wade through it. 

Though not deep, the water rushed quickly over the stones. We mounted the fence to make our way across.

Excited to have reached our destination, we doubly enjoyed our Christmas libations. Then we forded the torrent one more time to make our way home.

In contrast, our New Year’s Day walk found us high above the rolling Cotswold countryside on Broadway Hill.

The path runs through a steep series of fields and connects the picturesque village of Broadway with its famous folly on top of the hill.

Clouds scudded quickly across the dramatic sky, while the land beneath appeared an undulating quilt in many shades of green.

At the summit, Broadway Tower glows in the setting sun. On we go, into 2013!

Solstice

Happy winter solstice! Now the days begin to lengthen. Soon it will be time to sow those first seeds…

Wishing you all peace and joy in the New Year.

A gate anchors spiders’ frosted webs.

Parkrun

Now that the garden lies sleeping, what’s one to do for a little fresh air and exercise?
If you are Nick and the girls, the answer is the Parkrun – a scenic 5k (3 mile) dash/jog around our local park that takes place every Saturday morning.

Over 250 runners line up for the start of the Parkrun. Cold, but no rain!

Nick finishes strongly. This man can run.

Zoe achieves another Personal Best and comes in second in her age category.

Isobel finishing with a Personal Best. What a kick – she’s running right out of the frame.

Team Birch Modern

Giving thanks

It’s deep into November. The sky’s default is grey and leaden. The rain has been fairly constant, falling on already saturated ground. The result has been country-wide flooding. Our local rivers, the Avon and the Leam, have spread impressively, alarmingly, over their banks. I went out to the allotments this past weekend to dig up some parsnips and fennel and collect sage and thyme for our Thanksgiving dinner. The rutted road’s puddles were mini-lakes, our grass so sodden that it squelched as I walked. The parsnips came out of the earth encased in a thick layer of soupy clay. So everything is wet, very wet, but not submerged, like on some other plots. Something to be thankful for.

I have no lovely photos to share of our turkey feast, though we did our best to celebrate with friends Jonathan (who read a poem for the occasion) and Phil, using vegetables from our allotment: potatoes, parsnips, fennel, swiss chard, garlic, and herbs (though the pumpkin was so bland and watery that it was left, unwanted, in the pantry – the pie was made with canned). We are thankful for what we were able to grow this season, and thankful, too, that we don’t have to rely exclusively on it! Most of all we’re thankful to have each other, our families, and our friends – both near and far.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Sweet peas and cosmos, before the frosts.

Fruitful autumn

It’s cold and getting dark earlier now, so it’s nice to look back to early autumn and celebrate some late harvests.

Autumn raspberries

Our autumn raspberries kept cropping for months. We ate lots on cereal and out of hand and I made some (seedy but delicious) jam. The plants continued to produce over a long period of time, and even this week when I ventured out to the sodden allotment, I spied red berries newly dropped on the ground. Hurray for a fruit that the birds don’t seem to poach!

We were picking a small punnet or two regularly from August through October.

Our sweetcorn harvest wasn’t extensive, but it felt like a triumph to end up with any after such a dismal summer. (Still, our “homegrown” didn’t match the sublime cobs we enjoyed from the farm stands of central Massachusetts and Western New York.)

The last of the beans and zucchini, some carrots, fennel and the pie pumpkins. Soon after harvesting, the first frost of the season arrived.

 

 

A new coat for winter

Earlier this autumn we realized that our (attractively?) scruffy, weathered allotment sheds were becoming a bit too dilapidated. The roof of the green one was leaking and the protective stains covering the wood had essentially been worn away. Some sort of  refurbishment was sorely needed if we wanted them to remain standing through the coming winter winds and rain. So we finally assembled the necessary supplies to give them a much-needed spruce up.

“Forest Green” – the thirsty wood soaked up the paint and cried for more.

She loves to paint – even sheds.

The little red shed brightens up.

We’re pleased with the results – aesthetically and practically. But do you know what the best thing about finally getting around to painting the sheds was?

In preparing to paint, Nick cleared away the nettles and logs from behind the green shed and by doing so unearthed my long-lost set of keys! There they were, rusting but perfect, right where they must have been flung out of the door’s lock months before. Hooray!

Potato harvest

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the weather, our potato and tomato plants had succumbed to blight while we were away. A fungal disease, blight is almost impossible to avoid in rainy summers. It causes the leaves and stems of the plants to turn brown and rot. Soon the fruit is also affected and becomes inedible. It is evil.

Tomatoes ripening on the windowsill. These represent about half of our total crop for 2012.

Blight basically wiped out our tomato crop this year, and experience tells me that I really must stop trying to grow tomatoes outside in this climate! Especially full-sized ones. We’ve eaten a few cherry tomatoes from plants we stuck in pots at home and, without a proper greenhouse, that’s probably all I can reliably hope for. Rather than be willfully optimistic in the face of hard evidence, my growing plans for next year will not include tomatoes.

Now, blight on potatoes is also bad, but not as instantaneously devastating. As soon as we returned, we cut the blackened foliage at soil-level and left the tubers in the ground a couple of weeks so the skins could harden some more. Then we dug the crop up. It’s fun to dig potatoes – like a treasure hunt. We laid the harvest out on the soil and, considering the rotten season, it didn’t look too shabby.

Charlotte – in better condition than the King Edward and Pink Fir Apple varieties.

Red Desiree – a great-tasting all-rounder

We placed the potatoes into paper sacks to bring home to store in the cool of the garage (along with some deliciously tart damsons we gathered from nearby trees).

It would be nice if the story ended there – with a vision of our larder well-stocked with potato varieties to see us through til spring (which did actually happen last year!). Unfortunately, blight-affected potatoes do not store well. They are compromised and rot especially quickly. Also, many of these potatoes have slug holes in parts of them (quel surprise!), and these invasions invite decay as well. I had to go through the lot yesterday and throw out a number which were already bad. So, the starch of choice for the next month or so will most likely be – potatoes.

Back to the plot

But enough of far-flung lands, what about our small patch of earth? Here’s how the allotment looked right before we left for the summer holidays:

29th July 2012

Despite the cold and wet weather, the allotment was beginning to hit its stride by the first of August. Besides harvesting and eating new potatoes, herbs, salad greens, the last of the broad beans, and the very first baby courgette or two, we were savoring some non-edible treats:

The fragrance of sweet peas wafts through the house. We were cutting armloads at a time.

Definitely more edible was this violet-hued confection:

Homemade blackcurrant ripple ice cream

When we returned home after three weeks away, we set out eagerly to see how everything had fared in our absence.

Vervactor surveys the scene at the end of August. The tassels of corn and the beans climbing their poles look promising …

Now, back to work.