Rhubarb is a perennial vegetable that is eaten like a fruit in dishes like rhubarb crumble and rhubarb fool. To grow well it needs fertile, free-draining soil. Once planted it produces a crop every year, growing from around March to October, although it can be forced in February for an earlier crop. Only the stems are edible, the leaves are poisonous to eat, and should be avoided. In autumn the plants die down and the rhubarb ‘crowns’ become dormant, and then regrow from spring.
Is rhubarb really that easy to grow?
It depends how you grow it. As long as the soil is fertile and free-draining, and has been prepared well to remove weeds before planting, rhubarb should be an easy crop to grow. After planting rhubarb crowns, water weekly until the plants are established (until you see signs of growth), and then water only in very dry periods.
Rhubarb is fairly low maintenance but it’s a good idea to remove any flower stems when they appear, as these can take energy away from the plant that could otherwise be used for stem production.
Then, in autumn, all you need to do is mulch around the crowns with well-rotted manure or compost. There’s no need to remove the stems as these will naturally rot back into the earth, returning their nutrients to the soil.
Some ways of growing rhubarb can be trickier than others, however. The easiest way to grow rhubarb is to plant rhubarb crowns. Crowns are offsets cut from divisions of parent plants – typically a piece of root with at least one dormant bud visible. Plant them in late autumn, 90cm or more apart, depending on the eventual spread of your chosen cultivar.
It’s much harder to raise rhubarb plants from seed, but if you want a challenge, sow rhubarb seed outdoors in spring in a seedbed, thinning to 15cm apart and then later to 30cm apart. When thinning plants, leave only the strongest plants. This is because the quality of seed-grown rhubarb can vary, and you want the strongest plants possible to grow on. Plant out your chosen plants in a permanent site in autumn or the following spring.
Forcing rhubarb also requires a bit more effort. This process involves covering the emerging shoots with a bucket or bespoke forcing pot to encourage an earlier crop. Do this only on established plants as younger plants may be compromised by the amount of energy required to produce early stems. The darkness prevents light from reaching the emerging stems and makes them grow more quickly, giving you rhubarb a couple of weeks earlier than normal.
To harvest rhubarb, take the entire stem, gently twisting and then pulling it upwards from the base. Discard the leaves, as these are poisonous.
So, if you plant rhubarb crowns now in well-prepared and fertile soil, rhubarb is a really easy crop to grow. However, if you want to grow rhubarb from seed or use a forcing pot to give you an earlier crop, you will need to put in more of an effort, but this doesn’t mean rhubarb is hard to grow.
Tip for growing rhubarb
Keep the area around the crowns weed-free, to prevent competition for light and nutrients.
