Growing and Forcing Rhubarb

20 WEST COUNTRY LIFE SATURDAY MARCH 23 2013
WCL-E01-S2
gardening
gardening
Forgoing rhubarb
and custard at first
could earn tasty
crops for a decade
Alan’s tips for
the weekend
■ Remove flower heads from
daffodils as they finish flowering. A
liquid feed with a liquid tomato fertiliser helps next year’s flowers to
form now. Check for snail damage,
too.
■ Plant ornamental grasses (or lift,
divide and replant existing ones) and
mix them in with your shrubs and
perennials.
■ Make a concerted effort to get on
top of weeds now, they are about to
make a serious spurt of growth.
Remove by hand or spray with the
new weed killer Resolva.
■ Time to get planting new herbaceous perennial plants. Astrantia,
campanula,
echinacea,
hardy
geranium, rudbeckia and verbenas
are the most popular varieties at the
moment.
■ Apply a feed of sulphate of potash
and Growmore fertiliser around
fruit.
■ Apply mulch around newly planted
trees but keep a gap around the
trunk. Fruit bushes and canes will
benefit, too.
■ Plant grape vines now. Our local
soil suits them if well drained. Plant
in the sunniest place.
■ Prune blueberry bushes by removing weak, old and dead shoots. Cut
out up to 25 per cent of all wood from
established bushes (three years or
older).
■ Plant strawberry runners if you
missed autumn planting.
■ Spray pears that have been
attacked by pear midge in the past.
Use Scott’s Bug Clear.
■ The first spray of fungicide should
be applied to protect apples from scab.
■ Pot indoor plants into bigger pots
but check that they need it first.
Gently knock the plant out of the pot
and, if the roots are covering most of
the compost, the plant will benefit
from moving into a pot one or two
sizes bigger. If they aren’t yet then
wait a while. Increase frequency of
feeding using high nitrogen feed
(Baby Bio) for plants grown for their
attractive leaves and high potash feed
(Miracle-Gro) for those grown for
their flowers.
in the garden
Alan Down
Rhubarb is a firm favourite with
British gardeners and it never ceases
to amaze me how many plants we sell
at this time of the year.
Classified as a vegetable but eaten
more as a fruit, this is one of the
earliest crops to harvest and helps to
fill the “hungry gap” between overwintered fruit and vegetables and the
first crops of spring.
Ideally rhubarb should be planted
in a sunny open position in the
garden where the soil is slightly acid
(pH 5-6.0) and on the heavy side.
Nevertheless, it does well pretty
much anywhere as long as the soil
doesn’t dry out and has plenty of
organic matter incorporated before
planting. But what rhubarb will not
tolerate is waterlogged and poorly
drained soil. And that sunny position
isn’t as important either. If you have a
shady end of your veg patch, this is
something useful to grow there.
Since this is a perennial vegetable,
it pays not to rush things along too
much and let your plants get really
‘If you have a shady
end of your veg patch,
this is something useful
to grow there’
settled in before either harvesting too
much or forcing to get extra early
crops. With a likely useful life of at
least 10 years and often three times
this, rhubarb should be allowed time
to really establish. This means forsaking that rhubarb and custard for
at least the first two springs after
planting.
Of course, once established, rhubarb can be forced to get those really
earliest tasty crops. This is done by
feeding the roots well and partially
excluding the light from the top.
Best results will be achieved by
covering the roots with fresh manure
containing straw in mid-winter. Because the manure is fresh it will heat
up as it rots and this heat will force
the new leaves to grow faster.
Now if you are fortunate, you may
have an old terracotta rhubarb forcing pot complete with its lid. These
are bottomless, broad-based and
narrow towards the top. Occasionally
these can be bought at dispersal auctions but don’t expect them to be
cheap. New ones can be bought for
around £60-100 depending on how
well fired the terracotta is. This
might be expensive, and indeed you
could buy a lot of rhubarb for that
kind of money, but rhubarb forcing
pots are also a very attractive addition to the garden, even if never
used for forcing.
Now second hand chimney pots
work just as well and these can be
picked up from reclamation yards for
considerably less than a new one.
There are not many varieties to
choose from and rhubarb has not
been high on the plant breeders’
menu in recent years. Nevertheless,
some of the old varieties produce
excellent results with Timperley
Early and Victoria still perhaps the
most widely planted. There are several varieties that have nice-sounding names, which perhaps allude to
what one might add to the rhubarb to
improve its rather sharp flavour.
These are, of course, the varieties
Strawberry, Raspberry Red and
Champagne.
Rhubarb suffers from few, if any,
pests but snails will eat the poisonous
leaves that they possess.
On no account try to eat the leaves
since it is only the stems that are
edible. Older plants may produce a
tall and not unattractive flower stem
of 1.5-2m in height and, spectacular
though this may be, it should be
removed as soon as it is seen. If left to
develop, the stem becomes hollow,
leaving a direct route for rainwater to
penetrate and rot the centre of the
rootstock.
For the very earliest harvest, well
established roots (“crowns”) can be
lifted in autumn and left on the soil
surface to receive the full force of
frost and cold temperatures of early
winter. These chilled roots can then
be coaxed into early growth inside.
The chilling is necessary to break
dormancy before the roots are packed
shoulder to shoulder inside dark, but
warm, sheds.
West Yorkshire’s nine-square-mile
Rhubarb Triangle (Wakefield-MorleyRothwell) is considered to be the rhubarb-forcing centre of the world, and
probably the universe, too. This ancient practice still continues with
only the light of candles used, I’m
told, to see which stems are ready to
harvest.
Apparently,
anything
brighter will stop growth and retard
this succulent early crop.
Of course few, if any, of us will go to
such lengths to force rhubarb but a
chimney or rhubarb forcer will produce excellent results and help fill
that late-spring gap every year if
planted now.
SATURDAY MARCH 23 2013 WEST COUNTRY LIFE 21
WCL-E01-S2
Plant of the week
Begonias
Whether we are in for another soaker
or a dry summer I have no more idea
than you, but I do know one bedding
plant certain to do well. Begonias of
all types have done well year after
year, and if you want to get a good
show in your garden, you could start
them off right now.
Some varieties do not produce
corms that you can buy and for those
you will have to wait for plants to be
become available later.
But many are now available as dry
corms that I must admit look pretty
unexciting and lifeless when you buy
them.
Some are confused by which is the
top and which the bottom of such a
curiously hairy-looking corm, but
Top, freshly cut sticks of rhubarb – Alan
Down says: ‘Since this is a perennial
vegetable, it pays not to rush things along
too much’; above, reliable begonias are
Alan’s plant of the week
Cleeve Nursery’s Alan Down can be
contacted at the nursery on 01934
832134. If you would like to ask Alan
Down a gardening question, visit
www.cleevenursery.co.uk and click on
the Ask Us A Question tab. Alan can
answer only emailed questions. Visit
Alan’s blog at cleevenursery.co.uk/blog.
You can also follow Alan on Twitter: @
AlanEDown
the simple answer is to always ensure
that the dished concave part is
upper most.
Potted up with a bit of heat (perhaps a windowsill) in a pot filled with
compost, you will soon have strong
shoots growing that will develop into
compact plants that can be put outside after the risk of frost has
passed.
Begonias do not need any special
sort of compost but seem to do best
with soil-free multipurpose compost.
Bear in mind that virtually all potting composts will need supplementary liquid feeding around four to six
weeks after potting. There are many
suitable feeds and among the best are
Miracle Gro, Phostrogen or Maxicrop
general liquid feeds.
Begonia corms are widely available in garden centres and nurseries
now.
■ Mulch the ground around the
plants with chipped bark or mushroom compost to suppress weeds and
conserve water.
■ Avoid compacting wet soil by working from boards to spread your
weight.
■ Re-pot fuchsias, pelargoniums and
other over-wintered tender plants.
Cut away any dead shoots and prune
back to strong shoots near the base
wherever possible.
watch the herons feeding and caring
for their clutch. As I write this today,
the first of three chicks has hatched
and will grow at an amazingly fast
rate.
Easter chicks hatching
Make a date in your diary to come and
watch real chicks hatching during
the Easter weekend. Now a firm tradition at Cleeve Nursery, we have
hens’ eggs in an incubator hatching
Saturday to Monday.
ask Alan
Japanese Weekend
From April 6-7 we have a Japanesethemed weekend with talks, demonstrations and, of course, lots of
Japanese plants. There is more detail
on our website www.cleevenursery.co.uk but we hope to have sushi,
music and martial arts as well as lots
of beautiful plants on show.
Question
A friend has asked me to take care of
an Anthurium flamingo plant cutting
which she was given by a friend in
Ireland. She has only managed to grow
one leaf so far. I have had the plant for
about a month and have noticed that
the compost is infested with white
microscopic bugs which seem impossible
to get rid of. Do you think they could in
any way be causing damage to the
plant?
James Wong at Cleeve
Well known ethno-botanist James
Wong will be visiting Cleeve Nursery
on April 25 from 11am-12.30pm. Come
and meet him and have an informal
one-to-one chat with him.
Mrs Sheppard
Answer
It sounds as if your plant is infested
with “fungus gnat” (Sciarid fly) larvae.
These feed on rotting organic matter in
the compost media and do not normally
do any direct damage to plants.
However, if there are enough of them,
they can disturb the roots so it is a good
idea to try to control them. In trays of
young seedlings and cuttings they will
eat the roots so it is worthwhile
controlling them. You can control them
with Nemasys Sciarid Fly Killer as a soil
drench. Adults can also be trapped on
yellow sticky pads hung close to the
plant. Anthurium flamingo is slow
growing so be patient.
‘There are several
varieties that have
nice-sounding
names, which
perhaps allude to
what one might add
to the rhubarb –
Strawberry,
Raspberry Red and
Champagne’
Cleeve events
Live HeronCam
Live TV footage from a nest in the
largest heronry in the Bristol area to
view seven days a week in our garden
centre’s wildlife area. Come and
From top down, jobs for the weekend
include pruning the blueberry bushes;
mulching the ground around plants to
suppress weeds; and repotting fuchsias
For Good Advice
& Excellent Home
Grown Plants
plot lines
Fiona Sanderson
We are still waiting for the cold
weather to leave us alone, but as
temperatures do reach a more springlike level, it is certainly time to be
getting the early potatoes in.
The earlier that you can get them
growing, the sooner they reach the
plate, and the taste of fresh new potatoes, hot and buttery, is one of the best
pleasures life can offer.
“First early” potatoes are the best
ones at bulking up fast; get them in by
the end of March, and they will be
ready to start harvesting near the end
of June.
If you have just a small space to
grow veg, then I think that an early
“salad” potato is the best type to
choose, because these are delicious,
and you will be eating them when
they are new enough to feel special.
Later in the season, all kinds of
potatoes are more available quite
cheaply, which diminishes that sense
of satisfaction at growing your own.
Early salad varieties can be grown
quite well in containers, but if you are
choosing this method, it’s worth in-
vesting in a good compost-rich
medium.
Results will be disappointing if you
cut corners, particularly if you just
use soil.
A nice open compost-rich mix will
keep everything light and airy, and
retain a lot more moisture.
On an allotment scale, it’s good to
put your earlies in about 30cm apart,
and with 60cm between rows. These
are easy measurements to visualise,
if you think about school rulers. They
don’t need to go in too deep, as they
will be harvested smaller than the
maincrop varieties that need more
room to grow.
Sometimes people wonder whether
it’s necessary to buy seed potatoes, or
whether it’s possible to use shop
bought ones. If they have started
sprouting in the cupboard, it can be
tempting to see them as a quick
source for planting.
I have some in my own cupboard,
which have done just this, but when I
compare the spindly white sprouts
with the ones that are emerging from
Gardeners could have
potatoes ready to harvest
by the end of June if they
get ‘first early’ crops in by
the end of the month
the proper seed potatoes, which are
short and strong, I know which ones
I’d bet on. If the soil is still chilly
when they go in, those spindly jobs
would just shrivel and be no good at
all.
Bear in mind, too, that supermarket potatoes have been sprayed to
prevent them sprouting, so you won’t
know what you’re getting from those
anyway.
If you read this column regularly,
you’ll know about the Nicholas Lane
and Talbot Road allotment shops, in
Bristol, that sell all kinds of seed
potatoes at very reasonable prices.
And if you haven’t got on with the
business of chitting, or sprouting the
early potatoes, don’t worry, there’s
time yet.
Maincrop varieties can start chitting now, for planting in April. Many
gardeners don’t bother chitting
maincrops, but I think it’s a good
idea; anything that speeds up growth
is good, so that the plants, and spuds,
will have grown as much as possible
before blight is likely to strike.
visit your local nursery!
Cleeve Nursery
138 Main Road, Cleeve, BS49 4PW
01934 832134
www.cleevenursery.co.uk
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