Early one spring, on our former chunk of land, I stumbled upon an old row of rhubarb plants growing in a young woods. Since we had a gleaming new Troybilt tiller my husband was itching use, we decided to till a row in the side yard and transfer the 17 plants we had found to it. We didn't have much hope for the roots we dug up -- they looked gnarled and small. Much to our surprise and delight, within a month, all of the plants took. By the next spring I counted 25, all which grew into very large plants. Thank heavens we had allowed over a foot between those tangled roots because they took up every inch of space!
While I had grown up with a rhubarb plant in the yard, the only thing I remember my Mom using it for was stewed rhubarb (our "spring tonic") and rhubarb pie. I really didn't know much about this vegetable nor of it's uses. Until we had 25 massive plants to harvest from, that is! As I studied up on this food source, word-of-mouth helped with the first harvest. And that's when I learned how to "pull" the outside stalks from the plant, taking care not to disturb the root system.
A neat thing I noticed about the discarded leaves is that they effectively smothered weeds. That first harvest sent the toxic green tops to the sloping back of our yard, creating a nice mat. The next year, no weed whacking was needed in that area.
I have since stumbled across wonderful recipes for rhubarb and some really odd uses, too. Such as? Did you know that rhubarb acts like a bleach on white cotton and some other natural materials? Simply take half of a mature stalk, mince it up and add a cup of water to it. Bring it to a rolling boil; remove from the heat; cool. Take the stained blouse, shirt or what-have-you and dab the juice from the cooled solution on the stain with a brush. Place the garment or item in the sun for an hour or two. Rinse the spot under warm water and launder as usual.
If you'd like to study up a bit on rhubarb, here are some sites that may be of interest to you:
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