Tuesday, June 6

BLOOMING OR BOLTING RHUBARB BED ?



Flowering is not a desirable trait when you grow rhubarb for harvesting, but except for the very first shoots in early spring (very good with pickled herrings), the rhubarb bed here serves only as a decorative and quite effective barricade against the highly enterprising goutweed settlement beside the box bread bed, so I may well claim that it is blooming very nicely.

In the background you can see the down pipe that leads the rain falling on one side of the roof to a small canal, which ends in the corner of the box bed. As the bed slopes slightly in several directions, the water is distributed evenly between its twelve solitary shrubs and the surrounding lilac and cinquefoil hedges.



It is only the second time the rhubarb bed has flowered in the last ten years. The first time it happened was a couple of years ago and it didn’t seem to affect next year’s growth as you often hear may be the case. The flowers are beautiful, I think, making it worth while tapping into the coveted carbohydrate storage as well as running the risk of awakening the uncultivated lineage by allowing the flowers to seed.

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