The second year of rhubarb

This is the second year of me having rhubarb, and I'm looking forward to being able to harvest some for the first time this year. You don't get to harvest any in the first year, but in the second year, you can harvest it between April and June once the stalks reach 30 cm and the leaves are fully unfurled. The important thing is not to take too many stalks – only a few stems at a time and never more than half the plant so that it stays vigorous. Mine is nowhere near big enough to eat yet, but I'm hoping to get at least a pie worth out of it by the end of June. I'm not sure how big the plant is going to get, but if I end up with too much (more a hope than an expectation at this stage), I can always freeze it.

You can freeze rhubarb raw, blanched or cooked. I've only tried it raw and chopped into chunks in the past, which is what I've done for pies or crumbles. It becomes more watery when you freeze it, but this doesn't seem much of a problem for pies and crumbles. However, fancier items, such a muffins or cakes, don't do work with frozen. The BBC, which gives a full list of handy instructions for freezing rhubarb, says that later in the season when it's tougher, it's better to cook rhubarb before you freeze it, so I'll give that a go if I have spare in June.

My rhubarb is the Rosenhagen variety, which I chose because it's an old variety and contains less oxalic acid, which means it's supposedly sweeter than normal rhubarb, so I'm hoping to need less sugar.

The garden's doing surprisingly well for how little time I've had to work in it. I started growing broad beans late last year. I bought Super Aquadulce, which you can plant earlier than a lot of other broad beans (from as early as October), so they're now flowering already. I started them off in pots, as my slugs and snails have a history of devouring the tender new shoots of broad beans when planted straight in the ground and killing the plants. My broad beans also have a history of catching rust and getting covered in black fly later in the season, and I'm hoping that by giving them an early start, I'll get a decent amount of beans before the rust and black fly hit.

I've also made a good amount of fairly well composted compost this year. It does contain more uncomposted shredded paper than ideal – possibly because the paper slipped down from where I added it at the top into the well composted part. Generally it looks better than it has in the past. I always more or less follow the general rules of composting. I'm not great at turning the compost frequently enough, but I do usually put a mixture of both "greens" and "browns" in – partly because that's what my garden tends to produce. What I think I've down differently this year is that I've added more vegetable peelings and banana skins from the kitchen and I've maybe chopped some of the woodier stalks up more than in the past. If I were making the compost bin again, I think I'd make it a little bit bigger so that it gets hotter in the middle, as then I wouldn't need to chop things up as much. Apparently 1 cubic metre is the smallest you can get away with for that, and I suspect that bigger produces results more easily. At any rate, I managed to make quite a lot of good compost this year, which I'm pleased with. Doubly so, as my local garden centre has changed ownership and no longer sells the composted stable manure I like to spread over my garden, so I may have to make do with my onw compost.

I've also remembered to use my greenhouse to start some plants off early in pots. Those are peas. I've got growing in there. I probably ought to be bringing more plants on it, but I haven't got much time on my hands at the moment, so I'm just pleased I even managed to start the peas off there.