2 days Ago By Katherine McPhillips
Rhubarb is a handy plant to have growing in your garden as it is low-maintenance, and its ruby red stalks can be baked into many delicious goods like crumbles or pies. What is fantastic about rhubarb is that it can grow quickly, even when every other crop is just beginning to sprout from the ground, so you can have a busy garden without too much effort. Katharine, a gardener known as the Teabreak Gardener , has shared that getting an early rhubarb harvest is very easy as long as you do a gardening technique called ‘forcing’.
She said: “Just as its name suggests, the process of forcing rhubarb involves getting it to grow earlier and more quickly than it would normally want to do. “By shutting out light and enclosing to increase the ambient temperature, the stems grow tall in search of light.” Forcing is simply placing your rhubarb crowns into a dark and warm area, which helps the stalks grow thicker and stronger earlier in the year.
It also helps the stalks become more tender, which makes it easier to cook with and much sweeter, so you will have a better taste that is perfect for baking into desserts. This is a simple gardening technique done in late winter to early spring to get longer and tastier rhubarb stems while everything else in the garden is just starting to grow. If you have a shed, just dig up the crown, place it into a container and cover it with insulated material and keep it somewhere dark where the temperature is at least 10C.
However, if you do not have a shed, then do not worry, as you can do it anywhere in your garden as long as you have the right equipment. Katharine said: “Commercially, forcing is done in warm, dark sheds, with the UK’s famed West Yorkshire ‘Rhubarb Triangle’ producing tonnes of delicious, sweet, candy pink stems from January. At home, forcing can be done using a special terracotta forcer.
” A terracotta forcer is a bell-shaped pot with a lid which you can place your rhubarb in and will help the plant retain heat. All you have to do is leave the forcer alone for roughly a month, and check on the rhubarb regularly to see if it has grown tall enough to harvest. Katharine added: “The forcers are attractive additions to a veg patch and have a little lid so that you can take a peek in spring to see how your rhubarb is doing.
“If you don’t want to buy a forcer, anything that can be placed over the crown to shut out light will work. I use an old chimney pot with a saucer on top, or you could use an old bin or bucket.” Once the red stalks have reached a good size, remove them and place them back in the garden to give the rhubarb time to get back its energy.
It is best to only force your crowns once every two years so you do not deplete the crop..
