Weeding the Web

How to Harvest Rhubarb

One of the features of modern times, in my opinion, is the proliferation of instructions and an accompanying fear in novices of getting things wrong. Perhaps it has always seemed thus, but the media nowadays strikes me as particularly strong on nannying didacticism.

So, as reassurance, I can reveal that a member of my family, well advanced in years (no, not me!) has managed to go through life without ever knowing exactly how to harvest rhubarb. Both she and the rhubarb plants that have endured her cutting, rather than pulling, have survived, so it just goes to show that getting things wrong isn't as disastrous as we are sometimes led to believe.

However, harvesting rhubarb stalks by pulling is, according to Tom Cole in the Videojug production below, beneficial to the plant as it stimulates the roots. For best results in future years, you should also restrict your harvesting to plants three years old or more. Actually, he says you can harvest a couple of sticks from two-year-old plants, but only in the first two weeks, so it barely seems worth it.

So, just to stop you having to carry a sharp blade across the uneven surface of the garden (risk assessment - another feature of modern times), here's how to harvest rhubarb:

 

Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb

In my post Cutting off the Rhubarb's Flower Bud: what are we missing? I included a picture of said flower and pointed out that it wasn't really worth the wait. The other reason you shouldn't let your rhubarb flower is that it could well be the end of the plant.

Which is what happened to mine. The plant pictured died down for winter, never to be seen again. It had always been a weakling anyway, being Glaskins Perpetual grown from seed.

It takes some time for seed-grown rhubarb to bulk up enough to produce a good number of sticks (I'd personally say longer than the two years suggested on The Rhubarb Compendium, a comprehensive and excellently referenced site, but I didn't exactly cosset my plant).

We still have a plant of Glaskins Perpetual, around eight years on, and although it does now produce numerous sticks, they are spindly affairs that mean you need twice as many as you might pick from, say, a Victoria. On the whole, I'd go for planting crowns of rhubarb (that's the root part, if you're not sure), widely available in seed catalogues. Altogether more robust, producing thicker stalks.

Cutting off the rhubarb's flower bud: what are we missing?

If you grow rhubarb, then any time soon your plants will be doing their best to beautify themselves with flowers.  You shouldn't be just picking stalks, but also vanquishing such vanity by removing the flower bud.

All the gardening books exhort you to do this, as it is said to save the plant’s energy for growing the bits we want to eat. Though, if your rhubarb is like mine, it just becomes more energetic in sending up more buds, which is why last year I got to wondering.

Normally I obediently cut off every one (I was a good girl at school, too), but last year my curiosity won. What was I was hacking off? My imagination ran riot. Rhubarb is a showy plant; surely its flowers would match the leaves? At the very least, I decided, it would produce a tall column topped with a colourful spike, possibly like a delphinium, maybe even a verbascum. Whatever form it took, I was positive it would be bright crimson.

So I let one flower.

For all those who’ve ever wondered what a rhubarb flower actually looks like, the result is pictured. It’s not a spike and it ain’t crimson.

This year I’m hacking them off.