Measure Twice, Cut Once

A planting we did go.

Rhubarb today.

I can still remember my first garden; I was all of about 8, maybe 9 years old. The gardening bug bit me at a very early age and I have tried just about every kind of garden you can think of. I’m one of those that can sit and look at seed catalogues for hours, and then - when I can’t stand it anymore and the garden is still locked in the dead of winter. I just sit down in front of the computer I use a wonderful old computer program called Mac Draw Pro and I can plan and layout just how I want to plant the garden in the spring.

This winter I didn’t do too much computer gardening I used my allotted computer time working on my self-heating house plans. But now that spring is here it is time to be out planting and forming new garden beds. I’m still working on my self-weeding garden system, which I think is going to be a great success this year. I have all the mulch I need from the cleaning up of the hay fields. After much digging and first working up the new garden patch with the tractor, I have new beds ready for planting. My oldest daughter and I have been busy planting some seeds in six packs to seed in the garden. We seeded the squash - I like to just start them in pots for a week or so - more just to crack the seed. I find this gives them a great start. Many plants that are started by seed are greatly helped in this way by just using a cracking chamber to get them to go. This is how many of the big greenhouse nurseries start their plants. I have found a very cheap and easy way to do this on a very small scale (watch for an upcoming post).

Today we have some rhubarb plants to set out, we managed to get some plants from a very old farmyard. We have tasted this rhubarb before and are very happy with it. My wife and I both love rhubarb in baking - one of my favorite recipes is rhubarb cobbler and I’m very happy to have been able to go back to the area I grew up in and bring a small piece of it home.

Rhubarb is a very heavy feeder and can stay in the place you plant it for a very long time, I’m just guessing here but I would say the farmyard we got the plants from is well over 75 years old. So it has proven itself to be very hardy. I first dug a good deep hole and filled it half way with good compost I then mixed in some garden dirt and planted the rhubarb it had four pieces all with healthy leaves. I mixed up some more compost with dirt and covered the plants up. I had a bit of a mound with leaves sticking out and the plant crowns just showing a bit above ground level. I then watered them in good and mulched with old hay, they will most likely be in this place for twenty years or until they need to be moved. The nice thing is that we now have a start of rhubarb and can cut off pieces and multiply it and share it with anyone needing a start.

Tags: Homesteading, Organic Gardening, planting rhubarb

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 1:26 am and is filed under Homesteading, Organic Gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.