Saturday, Michelle and I picked most of our rhubarb patch, stewed it, and canned it. We’re proud of this, because it’s the first year we’ve handled our rhubarb harvest correctly.
The rhubarb patch after canning harvest. To us, it looks sparse and scrawny compared to its normal appearance (Photo: Mark Zeiger).
Michelle has always known that we should be canning rhubarb when it’s prime, at this time of the summer. Instead, we tend to eat it throughout the summer, then can what’s left toward August. We do all right with that, but she has always intended to get to the canning earlier.
We got about 9 quarts of rhubarb, which we’ll store for the winter, when we’ll really need it. We picked all but one or two stems from each crown, so our main patch looks pretty scraggly right now. Luckily, we have a small patch over by the garden that we planted several years ago. We can eat from that while the main patch recovers from the harvest. That shouldn’t take long, especially if we get a couple of good rains. We may have to cut back on consumption a little bit, or perhaps settle for less than the best for a bit, but come January, we’ll be glad we did.