Dear Diary

Today we acquired 4 grown tomato plants and several sticks of rhubarb.We spent last weekend putting the glass into the greenhouse that was at the bottom of the garden.

I needed something to put in it and, as we are at the wrong end of the growing season, we were happy to give a home to some surplus tomato plants grown by one of Neil's golfing buddies.

There are even some small tomatoes already growing.

I finally got my rhubarb plant a couple of weeks ago. One of the customers I deal with at work, well....chase for money, has a Conservatory business based in a garden centre. He was coming through to bring me a cheque so I cheekily asked him to bring me a rhubarb plant too, as I have had no luck growing my own from seed. And then, even if I did, I couldn't eat it until it was 3 years old - that's a long time to wait for a crumble! Anyway, I had every intention of paying for it but he wouldn't let me, I still made him pay his account though. Never mix work & gardening!

The rhubarb plant is still a little young to be eating it and so, when we were over at our friends this morning relieving them of their surplus tomatoes they mentioned that they had a surplus of rhubarb as well. So, ever keen to help out I offered to take some off their hands.

Once home, tomato plants carefully re-homed and watered I decided I would make the crumble ready for dinner. I always part stew my rhubarb and so I cleaned and chopped it and put it in a pan with some sugar and a little water and left it on a low heat to gently stew for 10 mins.

Now, it turns out that rhubarb has very little smell as it cooks, and burning rhubarb has even less and so, an hour and a half later when I went into the kitchen I suddenly realised that I had forgotten to set the timer, had forgotten I had left the pan on the stove and that by now crumble was probably off the dinner menu.

I think it highly unlikely the pan will be recoverable and so it looks like my few sticks of rhubarb will be a costly moment of forgetfulness as we had said any new pans we needed to buy would be to match the recent, expensive, cast iron ones, which I have to say are very good pans.

I wonder if they would survive slow burnt rhubarb?