What a difference microclimate makes!

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As I’ve mentioned before, we recently moved house, but we haven’t yet sold our old house. We moved only 0.8 mile, and as far as I can tell from scrutinising the ordnance survey map we must be about 25 metres higher up, so not exactly a huge change. Nevertheless the garden is quite different – a different aspect, more shade, but at the same time less sheltered. The difference was really emphasised the other day when I went to our old house to check on things and noticed the rhubarb. The rhubarb at our old house is in the picture above, and it's about five times the size of that at our new house, photographed the same afternoon (when I get a chance I'll post a picture below). Of course there could be other differences that I don’t know about as well, such as soil fertility or how much rhubarb the previous owners ate last year… The funny thing though is that neither of us was ever that keen on rhubarb until we found ourselves faced with a huge hedge of it, then we basically had to think of ways to eat it and we have both grown to like it and have found our new favourite recipes. Now it looks as though we’ll have to cut back again. But in the meantime I picked one stalk and that was enough to combine with a bit of preserved stem ginger and make a delicious crumble – not to mention amusing the girls by dressing up in the huge leaf as a big green sunbonnet! I did try to post a composite picture of the two plants but the system won't let me for some reason : ( All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2017.