Rhubarb a Unique Flavor From Your Garden

I had never tasted rhubarb till we moved to our farm and I discovered something that I thought might be rhubarb growing under some concord grape vines. I had heard of it and seen it, but I literally had never tasted it or even contemplated tasting it. I suspect most people are in the same boat with regard to rhubarb. Well after some research, which included calling the farm's previous owners, we decided that we did have rhubarb and tried some.

On first try we ate it in a strawberry rhubarb pie, which we really did not like that much, so we tried the straight rhubarb pie. This was a success. It was also a taste that I had never imagined existed. It is unique. Right now there is about a third of a rhubarb pie in the fridge, and I really want to go get some, but I already had my piece and do not want to be a rhubarb hog, because the whole family loves rhubarb in one form or another.

We have three types of rhubarb growing in our gardens, Valentine, Victoria, and our own "Farm Found" variety that no one really knows from where it originated. The Valentine is a solid dark red color, the Victoria is generally green but has some red in it, and this varies from plant to plant. I have one Victoria plant that is almost all red. Our Farm Found variety is mostly all red, but the red is not as dark as that of the Valentine.

The Valentine is the sweetest of the three, but still has a bit of tartness to it. The Victoria is the tartest of the three. You need to add some extra sugar if you make a pie with all Victoria, especially if it is mostly green. The Farm Found reminds me of a candy I had as a kid, Sweet Tarts, because it is a bit sweet and a bit tart. If I had to pick just one variety it is the one that I would pick, but since I don't have to pick just one we mix all three into everything we make with rhubarb.

You eat the stalks or stems, they kind of look like celery stems with leaves on the end. The leaves are a bit poisonous. The have a high oxalic acid level in them, but don't get worked up about this, just throw them away. Don't mix them in your compost. I just throw them in a particular spot on the edge of the woods. I believe you would have to eat a whole lot of them to do any harm, and I doubt you would want to eat a whole lot of them.

You can grow rhubarb from seed or from pieces of the roots. The root planting will give you an exact copy of the plant you divided it from, this is probably the best way to get the particular characteristics you are looking for. If you plant seeds you will get varying characteristics in the plants, which is okay. You might get a really great plant, or you might not be so lucky.

If I want to divide a plant to get a new plant, I do it in the spring. I just use a shovel and put it straight down through the plant where I want to divide it, and lift out the part of the root and the dirt. You only need a piece two or three inches wide and the length is as far down as you want to dig. Usually the pieces you get if you order from a nursery are about 2 inches wide on top and about three to four inches long. They call these pieces crowns. You can tell the top by the beginnings of the curled up leaves on it.

We live in Pennsylvania in the Allegheny Mountains, and our growing zone is on the colder end of zone 5. The rhubarb we plant is definitely hardy enough for our climate. It always comes up no matter how cold the winter was, and I do not mulch it for winter. Rhubarb is a perennial which is one of the things I love about it. No planting required each year, and I get to eat it with very little effort.

It grows well in full sun, but it will also do okay in partial sun or filtered sunlight from some light tree cover. I have never had anything bother it except deer. I now keep it all fenced from the deer, though I did have some out in the open for a while before I fenced it in, and they did not bother it that much. There are not insect, fungus, or other problems that I know of. It is a zero spray plant.

It does need fertilized though. I just start putting cow manure around it once I'm done gardening in the fall. I also put some wood ashes around it, just dumping my ash bin along the row with the manure. Before I had cows I just bought 10-10-10 fertilizer and sprinkled it around the plants very early in the spring. It worked fine.

My wife makes delicious pies and cookies with our rhubarb, and she also makes a sauce that is great on breakfast crepes or pancakes. I love crepes made with our own eggs and our own rhubarb sauce. I feel like I'm in a fancy French restaurant when I eat the crepes with rhubarb sauce. It is outstanding. A thing that surprised me about the rhubarb was how our kids loved it even when they were babies. They prefer it to maple syrup on pancakes, and we have awesome real maple syrup.

We harvest ours when they get about the size of a medium stalk of celery. You don't cut them. You just pull the stalk out/away from the plant, and they break off just like celery does from the bunch. The plant will keep growing more for a month or two as long as it has water and it doesn't get extremely hot. We have harvested ours through most of the summer, if it is a cool one. We watch though, because we don't want to over-harvest it and weaken or kill the plant. We also let it grow out once fall approaches to built up energy in the roots for the spring.

It is good to keep it fairly weed free, but a little bit of grass or whatever will not hurt much. I weed mine from time to time. You have to be careful not to pull off the young stalks when you are weeding. They are delicate and will break off easily.

One issue is the seed heads or bolting. Some plants like Victoria are prone to produce seeds. Others like Valentine or our Farm Find usually do not produce seed heads. I have heard to just ignore the seed heads and keep harvesting your stalks, and I have read to immediately cut the seed stalks down to ground level.

I have tried both ways. I think it is best to cut them off unless you want to collect some seeds. You seem to get more stalks to eat and for a longer period of time when you cut off the seed stalks. This year I kept two plants in seed, a Victoria and a Valentine. This was my first Valentine to go to seed. The rest we cut, though a bit late as you can see in the video. However we had some rain after cutting the seed stalks, and the rhubarb are growing like crazy again.

Rhubarb is a great plant to grow. It is easy to grow. It can be grown without any pesticides or fungicides. Once planted it can last for decades, and you just split it to get a new plant whenever you want one. I like having different varieties. I like the mixture of tastes in our rhubarb pies, cookies and sauces. For us it is usually the second "fruit" of spring. We get it about a week or so after we start getting asparagus. We usually are eating rhubarb by about the third week in April. If you have never tried it I think you are in for a pleasant surprise when you do.

How to Grow Your own Asparagus; It's the First "Fruit" of Spring

We did our first picking of asparagus yesterday afternoon. It is nice getting a fresh vegetable before the middle of April up on our mountain in Pennsylvania. It's been a bit cold lately, our local weather forecaster Punxsutawney Phil the Groundhog was right when he said we were getting six more weeks of winter back on Groundhog Day not too far from here in February. However, spring has finally arrived and so has the asparagus. The rhubarb is up too, but it is not quite big enough to start harvesting yet.

Asparagus is becoming my favorite vegetable. You don't have to replant it. It isn't that difficult to weed, because it is coming up before most of the weeds, and a big plus around our area is that the Whitetail deer do not bother it much. They occasionally will step on it, but I have never seen them eating it. Also, I have never had it mowed down like the deer will do to practically everything else if you don't fence it around here.

An asparagus patch or row whichever you prefer to call it is a nice spring project to undertake. And the seed and tree catalog nurseries that I purchase items from are usually going to put some on sale soon.

The first thing in planting your asparagus is to pick a nice sunny spot. It will do okay if it gets a couple of hours of shade a day, but not much more. I have some that I planted near some old jack pines, which I eventually removed, and it did well with a little shade from them, but they were pretty old and sparse and for the time they were shading the asparagus, it was more like filtered sunlight. So I would stick to a full sun area if it is available.

You want to pick an area with some nice deep topsoil if possible. Don't worry if you don't have this option; the asparagus will do well in any soil except heavy clay, and even if you have clay it will work if you fix up the bed properly. The further away from good topsoil either in the clay or sandy direction, the more important it is to dig a bit deeper and create your "own soil" for your asparagus planting. What to mix in to fix up your soil is covered next.

Once you have your spot you are going to dig a trench where you want your asparagus row. If you have great soil, then just dig it about a foot wide and six inches deep for however long you want it. If you start to hit some clay then dig it down about a foot or so and add some rotted cow manure or some good topsoil to the bottom of the trench.

You can also use finished compost, and you can mix a bit of peat moss in with the manure or other materials if you want to. I would not use a whole lot of peat moss though. Add whatever gets you up to the six inch trench needed. This is all you need to do for site preparation. You also want to have enough topsoil ready to fill in the trench once you have placed your asparagus crowns.

If digging a trench sounds like too much work you can also plant it using my "shovel hole" method. Which is explained in my YouTube video. I honestly have given up the trench method for this one. It is a lot easier and I get good results from it. However, if your soil isn't that great and you want to really fix it up before planting, I would use the trench method. Whatever way you choose to plant it, this post gives information that applies to both methods of planting. And you can use my easy maintenance method with either trench or shovel hole planted rows or plots.

The asparagus roots are often just called crowns. This is because they have a crown like top and the roots come down from the crown kind of like hair. To me though they kind of look like teacup size spiders with the roots coming down like legs. The teacup size may be a bit big, as they are going to vary in size, but they will be close to the size of a teacup.

The next step is planting the asparagus crowns. Place them in the trench with the crown up and the roots spread out around the crown and facing downward toward the bottom of the trench. You can space them as far a eighteen inches apart, but I usually put them about a foot apart. That way you get a more continuous row in a shorter amount of time. Once you have the crowns placed, just fill in the trench with your leftover topsoil. I would do this by hand around the roots/crowns until I have them covered nicely, and then I would gently shovel in the rest of the soil into the trench.

Now come the delayed gratification part. They will grow and look and be eatable the year you plant them, but don't cut them and eat them the first year. Just let them grow and keep them weeded. The will get to be huge airy fern-like plants, some with red berries. Mine get as high as four feet tall when I stop cutting them and let them grow out at the end of the harvest time. The first year they probably won't get that big, but they'll at least get to be a foot or two.

Now depending upon the variety you plant, you may or may not be able to pick some for about two weeks beginning the next year after planting. Make sure you look into this when you are selecting your variety and your supplier, because you are going to want to eat some of these next year - no doubt. With older varieties you may not be able to pick till the second year after planting. The year after your first picking, as described above, you can pick for about four weeks. Then the third spring after planting you can pick as much as you want, but I do not pick them for much more six or or eight weeks.

When I say pick, I really mean cut. To harvest your asparagus use a sharp paring knife to cut the spears a little bit below soil level. I sometimes cut them right at soil level, either way no digging is involved, just cut them close to the ground.

All of the asparagus that we have planted and eaten to this point is the tried and true Mary Washington variety. We like its flavor and size, and it has been a very reliable producer. Last year I planted some Jersey Giant and Purple Passion varieties. They both did well on their first season, and both are coming up now, so I am thinking that they will be good for the future, but I can't say so for sure yet.

After the picking period, you want to then let your asparagus grow out for the rest of the summer so that it can nourish and build up the roots to survive the winter and provide you with more good eating the following spring. What is nice with asparagus is that it gives you something really early from the garden, and when it is time to quit picking asparagus you have other vegetables and fruits ready to replace it.

At the end of fall, or the beginning of winter when your asparagus has become dried out and a light brown or golden color cut them back just a bit above ground level. You can use bypass loppers to cut each stalk near ground level, or you can just set the mower level at about 3 or 4 inches above the ground and mow them. You can just straddle the trench with your riding mover and mow them down. This is usually how I do it. I make sure that my blades are fairly sharp, and I also make sure that I don't mash the asparagus with my tires. If your row is rounded up or is not quite level, err on the side of mowing it bit higher, so you don't break up the clumps of asparagus too much.

About a week or two after I cut the stalks for winter, I begin fertilizing the rows. You should fertilize your plants for better yields. I use cow manure to fertilize my asparagus. I do not put it right on top the the stems. I put it all around them and along the edges of the rows. I put it about 6 inches deep. You do not need to use as much, but I have it available from my cows so I use it. Another thing that I do is I put wood ashes down the whole row, on top of everything about two or three times during the winter from our wood burner. Only use wood ashes, no other kinds of ashes, like coal or paper or whatever.

You do not have to have ashes or manure. I have them so I use them. You can use compost, or you can just buy fertilizer. If you buy fertilizer just use 10-10-10 and make sure it is approved for vegetable gardens. You can use fertilizers of other numbers, just double check to make sure they are okay for asparagus. If you can use organic fertilizer that is probably better. If you do use commercial fertilizers, organic or non organic, try to mix in some other organic matter if possible, but the commercial fertilizer will work too.

I have found that it is very hard to keep the asparagus from coming up, even when you don't have the time or energy to plant it properly it tends to make it anyway. I had ordered too many plants one spring and was just tired out and did not feel like planting the asparagus that I had left to plant. I felt like if I had to dig another trench they would be throwing me in it instead of the asparagus crowns. I just dug shovel size holes, choppped up the soil in the hole with the shovel, pulled out enough dirt with my hands to put a crown down in there, and covered it up. I then repeated this every one foot till I was out of crowns. This row turned out fine. We have been eating it for years now.

I think I have just talked myself into planting some more. I am going to check out the Stark Brothers website to see if they have any on sale yet. They generally have good products, and that is who we got the new varieties from last year. Our Mary Washington was bought from Miller Nurseries, years ago before they were bought out by Stark. I hope this post gets you thinking and perhaps doing and then eating some of your own asparagus.

Jim

Cows Get out of the Barn for the Spring

Red and Doggie the Angus Cross Steer on their first day out for spring.

We finally let our two Angus-cross steer out of the barn for the spring. We had hoped to get them out a few weeks ago, but we had two concerns. One was mud. We have had a ton of rain in March and now also in the beginning of April, so parts of the pasture have just seemed too squishy to add these two guys to the environment. The other was our four month old Scottish Highland calf, Monty. He made it through a rough beginning and through four months of winter, and we just were concerned about what would happen to him. Our friends who have farmed much longer than us said that the calf will be fine, but we kept putting off the mingling of the herds, hoping that Monty would have a better go of it if he was a bit larger.

The two guys pictured above are Doggie and Red. They are Angus-cross steer, who are about a year and a half old now. They are sometimes called Baldies. They are identified by their white face and black or red body. They are a cross between an Angus bull and a Hereford cow. If the bull is Black Angus you get a Black Baldy. If the bull is Red Angus you get a Red Baldy.

These two guys are really well mannered steer. Doggie, the black one, loves to have his ears scratched, hence his name. He really acts like a big dog. He will come when you call him, and he always wants to be scratched. Red is a bit more standoffish. He won't bother you, but he doesn't like to be scratched or petted. He does like to lick you and chew on your coat or hand if you let him.

Well these guy were in the barn for four months. They ate our loose hay, made the old-fashioned way, and good for jumping into. And we gave them some all-grain feed, fresh ground from our local mill. It has corn, oats, soybean, vitamins, minerals, and molasses. They love this stuff. We gave each of them two scoops, standard scoop size, in the morning and two more in the late afternoon. They did quite well and were looking pretty sleek. We have had some wet weather, and their loose pen was starting to get a bit sloppy, and so were they, so we decided to get them out. It is time anyhow. The grass has begun to grow.

We really were concerned about how big a disruption/danger these two guys were going to be for Monty our four month old Scottish Higland calf. He has been out all winter with his mom and dad. They could go in and out of the barn as they pleased. They are very hardy, and Monty has done well growing up in the cold on our mountain this winter. We figured he would be all right, and so far he is okay. It was a bit wild though when they all met up in the top field this past weekend. Monty ended up going head to head with both of them; he lost since they weigh about a thousand pounds more than he does, but he did not get hurt. There were some close calls in the general melee, but he is pretty nimble, and obviously he is a pretty tough little bugger.

Monty and Doggie after things settled down.

Today all five of them are peacefully grazing, but this weekend it was a bit interesting. We may buy a few cows at an auction this weekend. We will keep them away from the others till we make sure they are healthy, and then we will get to do this again, although I am hoping that it will be calmer with two new heifers or cows than it was for the steer, Doggie and Red.

Here are some of the videos I took this weekend on the day we let Doggie and Red out to be with the Highlands. The first video is Monty on the day before we let the Angus out. He had gotten separated from Annabelle and the Dun Bull. We think he ran into the electric fence and got a good shock when they were going up the chute into the top field; because he was down below, and they were up above, and the one wire was knocked out of the insulators. Also you can notice in the video how wary he was about going back into that chute before he made it up to his mom and dad. The other videos show some of the socialization going on as things got mixed up a bit.

Multiple videos: