Rhubarbage

We have a rhubarb abundance and have now entered into informal barter agreements with various neighbours -- P gets rhubarb for getting us scrap wood and for just being an all-round good guy; T gets rhubarb so he'll keep funnelling work opportunities our way; C gets rhubarb because she lets OH have her beech leaves for a Beech Leaf Noyau. We're also speculating on some of her cooking apples for our annual autumn scrat and juice fest.

A Beech Leaf Noyau, OH informs me, is a gin-based forager's drink. After two glasses of last night's high-octane raspberry turbo cider, I have no further objections to his brews -- they're all very, very good.

This morning we went out into the country to pick up a home-brew barrel -- 23 litres for a fiver, a classic cheapcycle deal. OH is beaming.

I know now why he keeps volunteering to do the weekly supermarket shop. I have become a bit of a liability in supermarkets these days. If I'm not glowering at squalling toddlers, I'm usually standing in an aisle and ranting conspicuously about "rip-off Britain" and dodgy pricing structures that are destined to catch out those with poor numeracy, i.e. poor people. If OH goes on his own, he gets to choose the meat and usually fits in about 2 pallets of cheap apple juice for his turbo cider experiments. (Protest from OH at this point: "Only a few litres." My retort: "It's hyperbole.")

I offered to do some rhubarb-based baking this weekend and now need to make good on the promise. Next door's P is outbaking me with his tartlets and advanced patisseries. I found a tasty-sounding recipe for a rhubarb-quark crumble cake online that I've extended with a few handfuls of our homegrown frozen redcurrants because, ironically, the recipe called for 1kg of rhubarb whereas I only harvested 600g.

So a tray of that is currently in the oven. When it comes out, I'll make us a quick thermos of coffee and pack the allotment cart. We'd swung by a garden centre on our way back this morning to replenish our seed packets and get some more fertiliser and to check out whether there were any deals going. We got two trays full of peas that had come on quite well, for £2 each, so we will plant these out today. Any of the other seedlings at the centre looked as though they had sustained quite a bit of frost damage -- they wanted 75p for their small yellow courgette plants, and they looked yellow alright! No way Jose.

I had posted out the help call for seedlings on freecycle and have actually had one response: a guy living not too far away is prepared to give away 12 of his tomato seedlings, bless him!, so I'll pick these up tomorrow afternoon. I'll probably prepare a note for our lottie noticeboard and offer some of ours in return -- we have a surplus of raspberry suckers, quite a bit of parsley and we could also give away some strawberry plants.

More jobs for the plot today:

* concrete in the fence post and put up the third trellis against it (pic to follow)
* plant out the scarlet kale seedlings
* plant the broad beans and runner beans and hope for the best
* plant the climbing nasturtiums against the trellis
* put up the sweetpea frame that I made last week and plant out the sweetpeas
* plant the strawbs
* plant the oregano
* weed the strawberry bed at the back


The cake should be another 20 minutes. Can't wait!