Putting oomph into rhubarb is important
GIVE RHUBARB PLENTY OF FOOD
If you’ve planted your rhubarb crowns, but forgotten how important it is to establish a rich, nutritious bed that they can draw from as they grow and produce tasty stalks for your eating pleasure, don’t despair; you can feed those ruby rhubarbs retrospectively. At a garden I visited just this week, the enthusiastic gardeners had planted their rhubarb into poor, undernourished soil and were anguishing over their predicament, but cheered up when they learned that side dressings of mature animal manure, of which they had heaps, would do the same job as the buried ‘‘treasure’’usually assigned to rhubarb: roadkill or something from the farm that had expired during the spring birthing period. If your garden features worms, they’ll do the work of dragging that gloopy nutrient mix down to the root zone of your rhubarb and the sweet-stalk-producing perennial will respond to that treatment by throwing up thick stems suitable for wonderful breakfasts and desserts.
DIVIDE CLUMPS OF COMFREY
The emerging leaves of established comfrey plants, having wintered under the soil as a tight crown, are unfurling now and rising up to catch light for the perennial herb that is so useful to gardeners like myself, who value the deep-rooting wonder for the nutrient-mining that it does. If you want more of what is a very good thing, take a sharp spade and slice the comfrey into quarters, lift the segments out and replant them elsewhere in the garden where they’ll carry on their job of drawing up otherwise inaccessible nutrients from the deeper soil and making them available to your more shallowrooting favourites.
ENJOY SPRING FLOWERS WHILE THEY’RE HERE
It’s spring, so be sure to enjoy it! Daffodils aren’t going to appear at any other time, so make the most of them now. It’s easy to take reliable seasonal performers for granted, believing that they’ll always be there. The reason for my philosophical rambling, is that I’ve experienced the disappearance of what I thought was a reliable spring event in my town – the appearance of the oldtime ‘Pheasant’s Eye’ daffodil with its small yellow trumpet and white outer petals, which grew, until recently, along a path between my place and the bridge over the river. They’ve gone and I know not where. I wish I’d spent more time admiring their unique This column is adapted from the weekly e-zine, get growing, from New Zealand Gardener magazine. For gardening advice delivered to your inbox every Friday, sign up for Get Growing at: getgrowing.co.nz and old-time forms, but I didn’t, believing as I did that I would see them next year. My advice? Nothing lasts forever. Appreciate every spring thing, and if you think a special flower might fade from your landscape, plant it in your garden and become a keeper of spring flowers. There are worse things to be.