Newly Planted Rhubarb is Struggling
Yvonne in Canton says, “My family bought me some rhubarb and we’ve had rhubarb in our family for years. Our neighbor cut ours down and so we had to replace it. It was planted in April. My aunt had always said that you needed to plant rhubarb with a month that had an R in it, and they gave me specific instructions. It just hasn’t taken off. We planted it in manure, which was what we were told to do by family. We’ve watered it some, it’s way back.”
There are a couple things I think could be happening. With rhubarb, sometimes it takes a season or two to fully establish where you’re going to get a nice production off of that plant. But if you take pure manure and don’t mix it with the existing soil, sometimes it can burn the roots initially and then it takes the plant a second to recover from that, it re-flushes its roots and so it kind of slows the process down. Now If it was blended with the existing soil, you should still be okay.
But trying to get some moisture back there when we’re as dry as we are. That’s a very succulent type plant. It’s got a lot of moisture that it draws up out of the soil. A little bit of watering back there may help that plant recover now, just because the top isn’t producing as much this year as you were hoping for doesn’t mean the root system isn’t establishing itself.
As that root system better establishes itself, the more it’s going to produce the following season. So sometimes when we plant even trees and shrubs, we’ll see the top growth not be great the first year, but that’s okay because we’re developing the root system underneath and the more established we get the root system, the better your top growth is going to be the following season.
Rhubarb really takes a good two to three years for you to be able to get good production. The first year or two you might have one to two stalks that you can cut, maybe five or six maybe none, but it really takes about three years to really get going.
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