Plant Rhubarb

If you are fairly new to growing your own vegetables an easy place to start is with rhubarb. It is simple to grow without asking for too much attention and will provide you with tasty stalks at a time when fresh fruit from the garden is scarce. Grown for its tender, pink stems rhubarb is a very hardy vegetable - in fact it needs a period of cold over the winter to produce the best stalks. Before planting work plenty of well rotted manure or good garden compost mixed with a good general purpose fertiliser such as Growmore into the soil to enrich it. Dig a hole slightly bigger than the plant or crown. The top of the crown should sit just above the surface of the soil.

Established rhubarb crowns can be forced now for the earliest tender stems. Forcing excludes light from the growing crown by the use of a rhubarb forcer or just an up-turned bucket. Keeping the crowns in the dark encourages the plant to send out tender young stems, which are forced upwards looking for light. Heaping compost, straw or well-rotted manure around the forcer or bucket will generate a bit more warmth and they will start producing even sooner!  They need to be a couple of years old before forcing, as this process takes a lot of energy and plants are best left to establish a good root system first. Once forced, plants should be allowed to grow naturally the next season to recover their vigour. Growing three crowns of rhubarb allows you to force one each year in rotation thus giving you the best of both worlds – tender, early, forced stems followed by a long season of harvesting mature stems, which can crop from May to August. It then gives the forced crowns a recovery period. Stockbridge Arrow is one of the best varieties for forcing