From the moment it turns marginally warm around here in spring, Theo starts asking every day for rhubarb pie. This year, from mid march, it looked like he was going to get some sooner rather than later as the rhubarb seemed to shoot up overnight in the warm snap we had around his birthday.

And then the peahens sat on them. They like to do that…sit on useful things, leaving the not very useful things, like dock, alone.

Six weeks on they haven't made much of a recovery. I keep hoping it's just the cooler weather that has knocked them back again. But I bought a back up plant from the local nursery just in case somehow peahen bums are the newest herbicide.

Every year there is something. Usually it's goats eating my dahlias. One year the chickens managed to scratch up every single one of my potatoes (that was the year i bought a book about gardening with chickens and the lady made it seem like the two could coexist...maybe hers could, mine can not). Another year, we mulched our strawberries and asparagus with straw that was absolutely filled with creeping buttercup and couch grass that killed everything. Last year a late frost killed all my tomato seedlings and set my squashes back by weeks.

I used to really take these set backs to heart. Now, I know it's just normal. There's always some new potential disaster I didn't consider that I now know about and can prepare for in future. The best lessons I’ve learned in the garden have been things I completely failed at the first time round. I wish I was a green-thumbed goddess where I could simply look at a plant and it would grow, but I am not her. My garden success is hard won, with a trail of failure in its wake. Probably not the best way to sell a gardening course, but I have a very thorough “what not to do” section.

And this year while we wait for ours to grow back, I trade bread for rhubarb with my neighbours...my abundance for someone else's and Theo still gets his pie (recipe linked below)

Hope your garden is doing what you want it to (whatever that may be!)