Daffodils and rhubarb update

There have been a couple of cold but beautifully sunny days here and so I have been in the garden and able to do a little spring tidying. A few years ago I told you about my unusual combination of daffodils and rhubarb in a small dark corner near the house. It’s a strange combination but one that has worked for a good few years – for more on this , see here. The daffodils used to be able to compete with the rhubarb but this year the rhubarb has taken over. I seem to have the earliest rhubarb on the planet, already looking lush and tasty, while nearly everything else in the garden is still hiding from the cold and the rain and the dark. As a result the daffodils have stopped flowering so I dug them all up and moved them to sunnier parts of the garden, where they have more space to flourish. You’re not supposed to move them at this time of year and they probably won’t flower this year, but I am patient and will look forward to them next year.

I planted a few under the baby pear tree and the rest under an apple tree. There was a well dug over spot under the apple tree as a result of a visit from some telephone engineers who arrived a few weeks ago with the ominous statement ‘We need access to your back garden to find a telephone cable. We may need to do some digging’ . I couldn’t bear to watch so left the supervision in the hands of my chief assistant. But they were very tidy, didn’t destroy anything very much (apart from a few squashed daffodils) and left this well dug spot for cats to enjoy and for me to plant out some more daffodils from the rhubarb patch

Then I harvested some of the luscious early stalks of rhubarb and made them into rhubarb flap jacks – recipe here

Fortunately I have a plan to catch up with my wandering sons in the next few days so I won’t have to eat them all myself.