How to Harvest Your Rhubarb
Rhubarb is a perennial vegetable with fibrous stalks that have a tart, tangy flavor and are often reddish, though they can be green. Also known as the pie plant, for its common use as a pie filling, the plant prefers cool weather and rich soil with good drainage. When your garden suffers from poor rhubarb production, part of the cause may be the way you are harvesting the plant. Does this Spark an idea?
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Instructions
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Leave your rhubarb in place and do not harvest any stalks during its first season. Similar to asparagus, another perennial vegetable, rhubarb needs time to establish if you want it to be productive over the long term. Harvest lightly in its second season.
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Guide your thumb down a stalk you want to harvest and simply pull it off with a slight twist to one side, similar to removing a piece of celery from its crown. Cutting into the stalk leaves a wound that makes the plant vulnerable to disease and insect attack.
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Stop harvesting when you have pulled one-third to one half of the plant or when the plant starts to produce thin, spindly stalks. Plants are best early in the season.
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Refrigerate stalks you do not use right away. They keep two to four weeks in the vegetable crisper. Rhubarb that is blanched and frozen keeps for up to a year in the freezer.
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Tips & Warnings
Wait until stalks are 12 to 15 inches long before you harvest.
Rhubarb leaves are poisonous, but can be put on the compost pile.
References
- Photo Credit Martin Poole/Digital Vision/Getty Images
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Comments
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Good to see you too. That would be great to get together sometime.
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It was good to see you today. Just sorry to hear about your illness. I hope you get well soon. Take care of yourself and I will be praying for you! Get a hold of me and maybe we can get together sometime.
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Don't let any website tell you that only the rhubarb leaves are poisionous. Not true. The stalks can be very toxic if harvested at the wrong time. If you harvest any stems that have brown dried leaves on top, or just plain out eat to much, cooked or uncooked, you are asking for trouble. Oxalate acid poisioning. Think Clorox Bleach. The same acid is in both. I was almost a casualty over rhubarb pie. My life has been changed forever over this. Digestive, gastrotestinal, bones, joints, ulcers, gout, internal sores, burning and itching of the nose , throat, eyes and outer skin. Hope that you like to eat baby food and soup for many months. Won't ever touch rhubarb stalks again!
