“Planting Rhubarb”
A vegetable that many families will find interesting and fun to grow, not to mention quite tasteful when mixed with strawberries for a wonderfully baked pie, is your rhubarb plant.
A pie made from tender stalks of rhubarb in early spring has all the deliciousness of an apple pie, and a flavor that the apple pie seldom has without the addition of spices.
You can make use of rhubarb in so many ways that you will not willingly be without it after having found out what can be done with rhubarb. You will consider it one of the garden standbys.
Rhubarb will, like asparagus, grow almost anywhere, and under all conditions, but, to get best results it must be given a deep, rich, mellow soil, and the soil must be kept rich, year after year.
Plant the rhubarb in rows about four feet apart, and two or more feet apart in the row. Three feet would be better, if you are not worried about having enough space in your garden, since old plants make a very strong growth, and cover a large amount of surface.
Rhubarb is a heavy feeder,and quickly exhausts the soil in which it is planted, therefore manure must be used in very liberal quantities, or there will soon be a falling off in the size and quality of the plant. To be tender and delicate in flavor, it must make a rapid growth in the spring.
Cover the roots with mulch in the fall, and work this into the soil in the spring, adding a generous amount of well rotted cow manure, at the same time. Do this as soon as the frost is out of the ground.
Be sure to keep all flowering stalks cut off. If it is allowed to develop seed, the plant will throw all its energy into producing seed, and next season you will likely have a rhubarb plant that has been greatly weakened as a natural consequence.
You can have rhubarb very early in the season by setting a headless barrel over a plant as soon as the frost is out of the ground, and by piling horse manure up around the barrel.
This will help heat up the soil inside the barrel around the rhubarb plant. The young stalks, from such forcing, will be extremely delicate in texture, and provide great flavor and lack the acidity which characterizes the later growth.
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