Rhubarb, Who knew?

Monday marked the first harvest from this year’s garden. The stalwart perennials of the garden are due praise and bring an early spring cheer to the impatient gardener – rhubarb and asparagus. My daughter has affectionately dubbed it a stemable due to the fact that you don’t eat the fruit as you do with most garden vegetables, instead you eat the stem of this plant. While Barbara Kingsolver has her tranquils, I’ve got my stemables.

I harvested rhubarb from the two plants growing in one of my raised beds. It was just enough to make a strawberry rhubarb pie for my father. It’s one of his favorite desserts.

There’s more rhubarb to harvest. Contrary to popular garden lore, this perennial will continue to produce all summer if harvested carefully. When I was growing up my parents, like most people, would wait until the plant was full and then harvest the stalks, leaving only a few behind to keep the plant alive. That was it, one bountiful harvest of rhubarb and then the wait until next year. Not that I minded as a kid. My mom is a wonderful woman but not a great cook. What kid wants to eat lumpy, mushy green goo? One harvest was more than enough for me as a kid. My dog didn’t find it particularly appealing either.

As a young adult, I too began my tending of this plant in the same way. Okay, I probably harvested it for several weeks in order to keep a fresh supply of rhubarb stalks and ended with freezing what I did not immediately consume. However, that was it, once again, a short harvest.

My attitude toward rhubarb changed over a decade ago when I was watching Roger Swain from the Victory Garden. Not only did he break the rhubarb stalks at the base as opposed to cutting them, he advised harvesting a little at a time. With a smaller harvest, one can continue to harvest the plant throughout the entire summer and thereby ensure an almost continuous supply of rhubarb in the kitchen.

Who knew? And why was this such a closely held secret? Maybe it was because most people were sick of it after the first harvest and could only eat so many pies.
I confess to having a terrible sweet tooth. Pie all summer – really? There's no lumpy green goo in my kitchen but wonderful recipes.

I have had great success keeping my plants productive throughout the growing season. Although I admit people look a bit weird at me still when I say I have fresh rhubarb from the garden. They normally stop me and say something like ‘isn’t that just a spring time plant?’ or ‘it can’t be any good now.’

Whoever told us we could only harvest this plant in spring was woefully wrong. The key is harvesting it regularly. Otherwise, the larger stems become holey, tough, and rather disagreeable to eat; this is mainly due to the fact that these old stems lacks flavor. It is also important to snap off the emerging flower stalk and force the plant to channel its energy into new leaf stalks as opposed to reproducing.

All in all, it’s a pretty easy garden plant to maintain and managed in this way it will produce into the fall. It’s one of the star performers in my yard.

For those of you who have never tried eating rhubarb, it needs sugar. Lots of sugar. So what exactly do you do with rhubarb besides making pie? I suggest poking at the internet for some recipes but here’s some of the ways I use it.

I boil it down, without sugar, into a sauce. I then use it in recipes for chocolate cake or brownies in place of oil or butter. Many people substitute applesauce for oils and butter. Give this a try. Rhubarb is fantastic in chocolate recipes!

My family loves my homemade strawberry rhubarb ice cream, a flavor you can’t buy in a carton in the store.

Pink goddess salad dressing is very nice on a salad.

An unlikely dish of 3c of rhubarb, 2c of sweet onions, 6 sausages, 2T oil, a little sprinkle of salt and sugar each cooked together is very nice as a humble casserole.

One recipe I read about this year was to slice the stalks into 4 inch long piece, add a small amount of maple syrup and bake in the oven. When it is finished baking, top it will a sliver of dark chocolate. Also on my list to try this summer is a rhubarb-tomato sauce per a recipe I found. It should be interesting.

Happy Gardening.