Also rhubarb tends to come into season well before strawberries and raspberries and the other 'garden fruit' that used to be all you could get, in the 'olden days'. When stuff was seasonal. So rhubarb would be the first fresh 'fruit' you got, after having eaten nothing but progressively soggier and older apples all winter.
I love a damson - I’ve come across them sometimes on country walks & it’s always a treat. Small, but concentrated flavour.
My old house had damson trees in the garden, at the end of a jungle of nettles and undergrowth. Some years there was such a profusion of fruit it was worth battling through to pick, but most years the trees only bore a few damsons each, so we just left them.
I comprehend each word but not the sentence.
I had this conversation/argument with my sister in law, a lady whose sole recreation appears to be cleaning everything to create a house that could double up as a show home, a place where open-heart surgery could be performed on the kitchen table. She got aerated - badly - about the "filthy condition" of the Yorkshire Pudding tins. She would not be told when I pointed out that you just brush loose crap off them, fill with oil and batter, then bung them in a very hot oven. Whatever you do, you do not make the mistake of ever actually trying to wash them as this ruins the process and means you can only scrape them out of the tin in shreds. She just did not accept this, even when I said that repeated baking at a very high gas mark means they're sterile. And if any bug survives that, then everybody's doomed and microbes will inherit the Earth. Is there a thread anywhere on OCD as a Fortean thing?
RHS Gardens Wisley used to have an apple week in Autumn where they sold apples grown in the gardens. Unfortunately, the place has become more of a theme park lately
and this event doesn't appear on their website. (Dog walking, craft fairs and Easter egg hunts 
but not apple sales)
The ex had an obnoxious colleague with the beautiful first name of Rosemary, of whom it was said she had a face like forced rhubarb.
Try and get to Waterperry gardens in Oxfordshire when they do their Apple days. They grow all sorts of varieties and they sell a lot of them on the day. The UK is perfect for growing apples, there are thousands of varieties we shouldn’t really just be eating Pink Lady https://www.waterperrygardens.co.uk/event/apple-weekend/RHS Gardens Wisley used to have an apple week in Autumn where they sold apples grown in the gardens. Unfortunately, the place has become more of a theme park lately
I bought some "winter banana" one year, yellow apple that really did have a banana taste. So many varieties not available now swamped under mountains of tasteless pappy mush in a waxy red skin.
Thanks, I will it isn't that far.
When I was about 11 I was ill for some time and very bored at home away from school, and a family friend did what she could and gave me some of her daughter's old Bunty for Girls annuals. They gave me unique although archaic and almost certainly inaccurate insights into the workings of the minds of my female classmates. Anyway, the details escape me, but there was a story in one of them about a public school girl (as always) with access to a kangaroo that feasted on sticks of rhubarb dipped in sugar.
Similar'ere, except instead of the Four Marys and kangaroo access I had a pile of footer annuals.
Various fruits, including apples and rhubarb, need a period of chilling to initiate bud formation and i guess soon the south of the UK won’t be able to provide sufficient cold in the winter to provide that. I believe the RHS has moved their National Collection of rhubarb to RHS Bridgewater outside Manchester as it will be happier (than, presumably, Surrey). It will certainly get more rainfall.
I thought only the leaves had oxalic acid and that the stalks were ok (for oxalic acid). I do know that that is why you never eat the leaves.
Women of my age may take agin' it because of its connotations.
Maybe it was a northern thing - never heard of it in the south. I did have a mate who was a comic fan & claimed to like Bunty. I also had an aunty Bunty who wasn’t really an aunt but was a more distant relation whose exact connection to my family I’m now not certain of - I’ve always had trouble working out slightly distant family relationships.
That would be Bunty Gunn, née James, still with us in her late 80s.Wasn't there a Bunty on the original 1960s TV series 'How'?
It's a diminutive, as when William becomes Bill or Billy, or when a Henry is known as Harry. Sometimes barely a syllable of the original remains. It's helpful where there are relatively few acceptable first names to go round.
