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Sally Nex

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Sally Nex

Tag Archives: kitchen garden

How to plant rhubarb

10 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by sallynex in videos

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Tags

how to, kitchen garden, rhubarb, vegetable garden

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You can never have too much rhubarb. Well, actually, you can: it’s a monster of a plant, with mature clumps expanding to 5ft across, so more than two or three plants will gobble up vast tracts of your garden. But the actual deep red, spicy, fruity stems, first to appear in spring when there’s nothing else sweet to pick? No, can’t have enough of that.

I am currently a one-crown household, my ‘Timperley Early’ next to the fishpond a nod towards gunnera-like swamp plantings: rhubarb has a pleasingly exotic sort of appearance and is one of those edibles that sits well among more obviously ornamental plants. Mine has scarlet pineapple sage scrambling through it and a hardy banana (Musa basjoo) spearing up through its expanding leaves.

But I would like three: the ideal setup for the longest possible rhubarb season, providing one to force, one to rest and one to pick. I daren’t force my Timperley Early, perfect as it is for that treatment being first out of the ground in spring; I know I’d have to give up picking it the year after while the crown recovered and I couldn’t possibly deprive myself quite so absolutely.

Luckily, last year I got to make a video for the Crocus Youtube channel in which I got rather muddy planting a little crown of Champagne rhubarb. After a little house move to the other end of the edible exotics garden and a year left alone to establish properly, this is about about to become clump no. 2.

Now is just the right time to plant new rhubarb, while the crowns are dormant and don’t mind being moved. You can lift and divide an existing clump, making sure each lump you split away to replant has a fat bud plus a root; or you can plant a new crown of a different variety. You can watch how here:

October garden: Veg plot

17 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by sallynex in garden design, kitchen garden

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Tags

kitchen garden, my garden, October, triangles, veg plot, zigzags

octgarden_veggardenzigzags

The beginnings of the zigzags are emerging at the far end: that’s my first asparagus bed on the left there, planted this spring

We have been here three seasons now: and what better time to start recording the garden that’s emerging slowly, painfully, from 30 years’ worth of indifference.

It is a humbling thing to create a garden. You come in with all kinds of grand ideas: you try to impose your own character on the soil but it turns around and says, no, this is me, I am this way and you cannot change my nature.

This garden has been far wilder than any I have made before. Nature insists on being taken account of: the great, woolly ancient Somerset hedgerows that surround us, for example, defining the space, and though we can cut them back to their bounds they are a physical, boisterous, living presence we can’t ignore.

And then there’s the growth: the exuberant, fecund, joyous speed with which greenery thrusts from the ground into the kind, West Country air. That’s great from a gardener’s point of view: I have never grown such lush, huge, wonderful plants. And exhausting, too: it includes hogweed above your head, bindweed sprinting madly up flower stems, cow parsley romping through borders and nettles thick as forests.

The previous owners dealt with the rampancy by mowing it within an inch of its life. They did little other gardening, in fact: it probably took all their time to get round the place with hedgetrimmers and ride-ons.

The veg plot was a long, thin lawn between looming hedges when we moved in. Very neat, very pleasant, very dull. There were four fruit trees: the remains, I think, of an orchard but sadly clogged with lichen and moss, the air still and heavy inside the bulging, overgrown hedges that left a narrow strip just 8ft wide down the middle.

octgarden_veggardenfurtherdown

At the near end it’s more chaotic but I laid out the zigzags with canes and string last winter. I love growing in big triangles: so much more creative than four-by-ten beds.

I change my mind more about where I grow my vegetables than anywhere else in the garden, probably because this is the beating heart of the place where I spend most of my time: it’s no coincidence that this is the first part of the garden I tackled.

So this bit has undergone a few reincarnations since its hedge-choked early days: at first, fresh from my allotment, I laid out the beds in a practical line of sensible, not-too-wide raised beds, the path down the right-hand side, smaller paths between each bed.

But I got so bored: sooo bored of looking at those straight lines, and though I tried to shoehorn a little imagination in there – frothy ‘Salad Bowl’ lettuces at the feet of my Telephone peas, that kind of thing – it wasn’t the inspiring space I wanted it to be.

Cue triangles: big ones, hugely impractical, possibly verging on the perverse, but ah! so beautiful. I weave peas among the feet of my beans, and march lettuces along the edges; I froth nasturtiums over the boards and draw zigzags in beetroot leaves. Every time I go in here my soul sings and I get so excited about what becomes possible when you throw out the rulebooks and follow your heart.

Here’s what it looked like in 2010 when we moved in:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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