A Rhubarb Deflowering

Last week after yet another of the very large, hairy dog's many daily constitutionals, Charlie and I rounded the corner near our garden and happened to notice that the rhubarb had a large flower stalk emerging from the center of the plant. Hmmm, that's interesting, I thought to myself, I don't remember the rhubarb ever flowering before. Is it supposed to flower? Better go check the Google...

As it turns out, flowering rhubarb is not, as Martha Stewart would say, 'a good thing'.
According to the oracle of Google, rhubarb may flower for various reasons:
- the selection may be prone to bolting
- plant maturity (older plants are more prone to bolting)
- low nutrients in soil
- weather (plants stressed due to drought or heat may be more likely to bolt)
- excessive crowding

Given that we've just experienced the wettest, coldest April on record for quite some time here in the PNW, I think the weather options can be ruled out. I fertilized and then mulched with mushroom compost last year so I think the plants are good nutrition-wise. The plants were here when we bought this house about 12 years ago so I suppose maturity could be a factor.

I'm going to have to go with 'crowding' as the primary cause since we moved the rhubarb from the ground near the sidewalk to one of the raised beds two years ago when we were removing the horrible yew bushes near the back fence (the rhubarb had to be moved to avoid being run over by equipment), and the plants have really flourished in the new location (most likely due to better summer irrigation but the better soil and mushroom compost has surely played a role as well) and are larger than ever but the roots are now constrained by the sides of the raised beds.

Allowing rhubarb to flower greatly reduces production, since the plants biological mission to reproduce and blanket the earth with rhubarb seed will have been accomplished at this point and it doesn't really have much incentive to continue to work at growing stalks as a result, thank you very much. Therefore, it's very important to remove the flower stalks as soon as possible in order to ensure the ongoing availability of delicious rhubarb stalks for as long as possible.

Here Garden Guy demonstrates how to successfully deflower your rhubarb:

hold the stalk and cut near the base*...

and remove

be sure to look for smaller flower stalks hiding in the leaves...

and cut those out as well

You can check here for more handy tips about growing rhubarb.

Gardening with Ciscoe had an interesting looking rhubarb recipe featured on a recent show: Rustic Rhubarb Tarts. I bought some puff pastry the other day and plan on making them this weekend. I'll be sure to report back on how they turn out!

Oh, and an update about my unfortunate new Crimson Red rhubarb start that I ordered this year from Territorial Seed: I called the very helpful folks at Territorial and told them about my rhubarb failure and they refunded my money no questions asked since they were sold out of rhubarb starts and there were no more available from the grower.


* As you might suspect, this post was full of tempting opportunities for some double entendre fun. I hope you will appreciate the rare display of self-control and maturity that prevailed. Barely.