Growing and Harvesting Rhubarb

[Music] hey dirt farmer J here from dirtfarmer j.com today we're going to talk about rhubarb you know in my opinion rhubarb should be a part of every home Gardener's inventory of plants it's perennial low care it looks pretty it's got that nice wrinkly big leaves and it's edible it's been known as pie plant and for good reason in another video dirt farmer Maggie will share her uh her world famous rhubarb strawberry orange Rin pie it's fabulous one of the favorites around here but for right now let's take a look at this plant what you see right now is a start in the spring of what it looks like when it first comes out of the ground you get a real short little bud uh it comes back every year at the end of the season you think the plant died it just wilts away everything falls off you rake it off and there appears to be nothing at ground but in early spring this is what you see when it first comes up then just a week or so later you can see here you've got these little uh starts maybe 8 to 10 uh Ines tall and then just in a short period of time we come back to you get this growing here now if you look over here this plant over here has been harvested twice this plant also has been harvested twice and this plant has been harvested once and and I left one of the flower stalks on it just to let you know what happens uh if you don't take out the flower stalks what happens they'll actually come out of the plant all over and they don't contribute to giving you a plant that's tasty or more stocks that you want matter of fact they kind of use up the energy and frankly they're not attractive at all the plant is more valued both for what you can eat out of it but also it's the visual appearance of these nice beautiful leaves and these stalks will actually take over the whole thing so early on I cut them out and what I want to show you here is what this stock looks like when you do cut it out it's it's shallow um rooted and it's Hollow there's nothing really edible on this although this these could be edible they're just uh not real quality I could use one of those here but uh these are of no use as far as for eating as you can see they're just stalky Etc so you want to get rid of all of those off the plant and this is what you end up with now as far as harvesting the plant some of the plants are redder in appearance than others that is the stalk is and I found that there's no flavor difference between them earlier you get the the stalks the more redder they're going to be the more tender they are you don't want to let the stalks get older because they get stringy they're more suery like they can work if you really chop them up and cook them down and for years we did that and it was okay until we learned how to actually get them very early the younger and the more tender they are the faster they cook the redder in color they are and I think the flavor is better as well but taking a look at this plant here one other thing I just want to make uh clear to you is that the leaves are not edible you don't want to eat the leaves they have oxalic acid in them they're not good for you however it's been shown clearly over and over again that the stalks themselves are just fine to eat just don't embibe the leaves now we're going to see if we can get a good uh look down in the plant here it's a little difficult but uh if I pull back the plant here you can see the red stalk showing up and harvesting is really easy all you do is you reach down lower in here and you pull and this is what you get ain't that beautiful so we're going to chop that off and I'm going to show you how toh process this in a moment so I just put these in my bucket and I just work through the plant pulling up sections here are three of them came up here four excuse me there's four nice really nice stocks aren't those gorgeous okay so we're just going to work through the plant kind of um pulling different areas so that you don't have a big bald spot allthough the plant will just continue to reproduce off off of its Crown okay and I'll I'll just stop at that because we can continue through but you can see very quickly you can get some really pretty stalks now what I I do to just process these is I kind of line these all up so they're about the same like this and using my uh butcher knife my bucket here I'll just take these and go like that and you get a really nice stalk like this and at the same time just hold the whole bundle by the leaves like that I got a little how's that really quickly and you see in the photo right now also a whole bowl of harvested U stalks that was done earlier that made about four pies of what you see in the bowl this could make a pie right here nice sauces as well and some people like to make jams and jellies out of these as well as far as planting it what you need to do is at the end of the season either in the fall when it's gone dormant or in the very early spring before it's woken up you can take a division and that's simply done with driving a shovel Point through about onethird of the crown dividing off a nice area of buds with some root tissue putting in a nice hole about all I'd say about this big full of organic material and loosened soil potting mix Etc and get that start starting again don't Harvest it in the first year or two let it get pretty robust and you can start pulling up your own stalks like this moderate fertilization moderate water and it'll come back year after year after year after year it's a great plan as I said i' highly recommend it for you this is dirtfarmer J from dirtfarmer j.com if you like what you saw today like the video subscribe to our Channel and if you have any comments or questions on this anything like you'd like to contribute please comment on our page until the next time I'm dirt farmer [Music] J