Hows your rhubarb?

My Timperley Early was great in Feb/March.
Perfect stalk lenght, thickness ans colour. I took one harvest off it.

The last two months have been woeful for both the Timperley and the Holsteiner though. Limp, weedy effort; I'm literally thinning it out to try improve it, then throwing out the thinning as they're not worth my time coking wirh.

Make sure to feed with well rotted (composted min. six months) horse manure. Plus the ground has gone very dry at a time when the plant needs lots of moisture. Water using rainwater if possible.

If you don't have horse manure, what's the best feed for a rhurbarb plant?

Mine was sowed last year, so this year is the first year I can harvest it and it's in a similar state to the OP. I was just chalking up its sorry looking state to it being a new plant. I have been watering it as it's just outside the greenhouse. However my mam was saying yesterday that a neighbours rhubarb patch is doing very badly, not sure if she even has any plants that are doing anything. She usually has an abundance of rhurbarb that she ends up giving away loads.

scarepanda wrote: »

If you don't have horse manure, what's the best feed for a rhurbarb plant?

Mine was sowed last year, so this year is the first year I can harvest it and it's in a similar state to the OP. I was just chalking up its sorry looking state to it being a new plant. I have been watering it as it's just outside the greenhouse. However my mam was saying yesterday that a neighbours rhubarb patch is doing very badly, not sure if she even has any plants that are doing anything. She usually has an abundance of rhurbarb that she ends up giving away loads.

Also ordinary farmyard manure - just make sure its well rotted down. Or even home made garden compost. It feeds the plant but also helps the soil retain moisture. If the plants are young and looking poorly - I'd suggest not harvesting the leaves until next year. The plant needs the leaves to build up the root system.

Mohammad Chilly Hillbilly wrote:

Generally best to not crop the first year and not after July for the next few years after that. Copping is removing the leaves needed to fuel the plant.

Oh right. I thought I'd be able to start using some of it this year! Learn something new every day - Cheers!

Any way to tell the varieties apart? I have 4 plants in row and it's literally a tale of two halves - two are thriving and two are very poor this year, limp stalks, very little growth etc. Two are Timperley Earley and two are Livingstone but (and this is my bad!) I'm not sure which is which. Or why out of 4 plants in a row (so identical food/light/water/soil conditions etc.) two are doing so well and two look like they're on the way out. I'd love to know which two are doing well as I'm thinking of extending the bed in the autumn and wondering what variety to go for.

High nutrient ground is definitely good for rhubarb. I planted some from my parent's garden when I moved to a new house about five years ago. The spot I picked was after being built up with loads of horse manure by the girlfriends Da who had planted some roses around the same spot. The plants took off better than I have ever seen rhubarb grow and are doing good again this year. It is supposed to be important to stop harvesting by September to allow the plant build up energy for the following spring. I make a habit of covering the old crowns with a layer of old horse bedding/manure over winter and they are usually starting to break through this to regrow by late winter. They might have been a bit slower this year to get growing properly but we have had some cold nights up to very recently which might explain this.

This year my parents needed to get some rhubarb again as they had left theirs get overgrown and I made a video clip of dividing one of mine which is said to be good for the plants. My intention was to lift the crown to divide it but the crown had got too big for this and in the end just slicing pieces with a shoot bud off with a spade worked fine and it is getting established well back at my parents' house and in the garden across the road from where I am living. I will probably have to call back to keep it weeded and drop off some manure. It is usually fine to harvest after one year settling in but I always think some common sense needs to be applied and to only harvest a portion of the stems and leave enough for the plant to continue growing strongly is essential if you want to continue to harvest more.

fryup wrote: »

should i use plant food to revive it? how about chicken manure pellets?

The time I apply organic material/fertiliser to rhubarb is in winter and that allows time for it to all break down and the nutrients be available for new growth in the spring. Not tried giving rhubarb fertiliser at this time of year myself but it probably would work to give it some help. If you have not divided the rhubarb in 30 years it might also be worth dividing some this winter and planting it a new bed of well manured ground. I read somewhere that it benefits from being divided every few years.

Mine is very poor this year also. It was flying until the storm there about a month or so ago and hasn’t been the same since.