Topic: Rhubarb

[gertie50]

I planted my rhubarb out last year, gave it plenty of muck, took care of it over the winter but now it looks very limp & it's not grown much. Should I pull it up & start a fresh with a new plant or is there a wonder drug out there I could use to bring it back to life.

Many thanks,  Gertie

[davyw1]

I planted my rhubarb out last year, gave it plenty of muck, took care of it over the winter but now it looks very limp & it's not grown much. Should I pull it up & start a fresh with a new plant or is there a wonder drug out there I could use to bring it back to life.

Many thanks,  Gertie

No,  It can take three year for rhubarb to establish its self but normally it happens in two try a high nitrogen feed and if you have not mucked it this year put some more on.

[Buster54]

Why don't you do both,buy a new plant and leave the old one it may be that it needs a little more time to beef up,they say they need a couple of years to establish a good root

[jennym]

Agree with davyw1, leave it, feed it.
What I would say is that I used to mollycoddle my rhubarb over winter, until someone from yorkshre told me not to at all, they were right.
Other thing is, when you're new to growing rhubarb, you tend to want to leave the stalks growing in hope they grow a bit more, but they get old and soft and useless.
Try giving it a massive watering, pull off any old soft stalks and wait and see what's grown in say, 3 weeks from now. You'll probably be pleasantly surprised.

[gwynnethmary]

 pull off any old soft stalks and wait and see what's grown in say, 3 weeks from now. You'll probably be pleasantly surprised.

I thought you hadn't to pull any stalks at all on newly planted rhubarb?  I'd love to be wrong, because I bought a plant last summer, then replanted it into the back garden this January (between snow storms).  I was expecting to have to leave it until next year to pull any stalks.  I did pull off a flower stalk last week after reading about that on here.

[jennym]

Well, if the rhubarb stalks are soft and the leaves looking limp, I'd say those leaves aren't going to do much by way of photosynthesis. By pulling the old ones, feeding and watering to encouraging fresh vigorous leaf, the plant would probably be able to photosynthesise more. I'm not advocating that you keep on pulling stalks in the same way you would an older more established plant, but just to get some fresh, useful leaf there.

[Chrispy]

When I planted out 3 plants, they spent the first year looking pathetic and limp, I would have thought they were about to die, but I had seen other peoples do the same, so I just left them to it.

It is now the second year, and they are huge, about 4ft accross, and I've harvested quite a bit.

[Robert_Brenchley]

If they're soft and limp it's because they're not getting enough water. That's likely to be because a newly planted rootstock hasn't developed a big enough root system, so it wilts as soon as there's a couple of weeks without rain. Just leave it and it'll be fine.