Our Rhubarb has been EXPLODING this year! Took a little walk through the garden this morning and figured enough shoots were ripe enough to start our weekend ritual of thinning the patch and prepping for a busy fall canning season.
We will pick until early July, and it's so plentiful have gotten into the habit of using different parts of the shoots for different purposes. Started plucking the nicest shoots and had a good 5 lbs this first pick.
chopped the bottoms and top 3rd with the leaves into the garbage bin. Important to remember the leaves of a rhubarb plant are TOXIC so we do not compost them, nor let the bunnies anywhere near. Bag them for the landfill. I've read some people actually make a decent organic pesticide with the leaves, as the toxins do dissipate but until I research more off to the dump they go!
Nice cold water bath and a gentle scrub to remove any dried leaves or bugs (there were none), and to the sorting table. any shoots that were less than perfect went into a bag which will be used as mash for fruit wine later this year. If you like coolers or fruit wine and have not tried Rhubarb raspberry please accept my condolences.
Ok, onto the fun part. WE make all of our jam in fall and rhubarb goes great with both our strawberries and raspberries. I prefer the smaller ripe lower part of the shoots for this, as they give off brilliant colour when canned. I'll cut the bottom quarter of the best shoots just for the jam or syrup. I love when there is white, red on the insides, and dark colour on the skin. End result is always a brilliant pink.
Once that bottom few inches is cut ill slice them to around 1/4 inch so that none of the skin fibers will be long enough to be noticeable in the jam. They are put into their own bag. We will pan them out later for flash freezing before storing in the freezer.
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The next 1/4 of the bottom we will save for the strawberries and rapberries, which are coming out in force now. Nothing like a piping hot rhubarb strawberry crumble with ice cream. Also good if cured in sugar and added to muffins or pancakes. These parts ill cut in 1 inch chunks because when baking you don't want them to dissolve.
The greener top half of the shoots along with any blemished stalks has been bagged and I'll bring them to our parents house for processing into fruit wine.
I'll be sure to keep posting as this years harvest goes on, as well as our recipes as we make them. Please follow if you want to see more from our urban garden or are interested in learning a couple nice organic recipes come canning season!!
Cheers!
