Ask the Gardener: How to keep your rhubarb looking sharp
Award-winning writer Carol Stocker offers advice on what to do this week in the garden.
What to do this week: This is a busy time for planting, weeding, pruning, mowing, and fertilizing. Plant trees, shrubs, and perennials, but wait until the end of the month to put in annual flowers, summer bulbs like dahlias, and warm-weather vegetables like tomatoes. Invasive garlic mustard is now in bloom, with small white, four-petaled flowers atop a vertical 1-foot stalk. It smells slightly like garlic when crushed and pulls out very easily. But don’t miss any! A single flower can produce five years’ worth of weeds. To pry out dandelions and other weeds with long taproots before they go to seed, use a long, narrow, V-nosed tool like an asparagus fork when the soil is slightly damp; the roots should slip right out. Sprinkle bulb fertilizer around spent daffodils, and leave the strappy foliage to turn yellow for seven weeks to store up energy for next spring. Most tulips won’t bloom again, so just pull those out and devote that space to vegetables or annuals until you plant new bulbs in October. Cut brown, dead branches on roses and other shrubs back to live greenery. Set the mower on high, at about 2½ inches, for a more weed-and-drought-resistant lawn.
Q. Rhubarb plants I’ve had for many years are coming up weak this year with small stems. Is there a way to rejuvenate rhubarb? I hope you are doing well and taking care of yourself. I think people who love gardening and nature have an advantage in these days of coronavirus, as opposed to people binge-watching TV series and saying they are bored. I have seen a lot more people enjoy our local conservation area trails, where in the past I have been alone in those woods. Hopefully some of the children who are getting out of the house and away from their electronic devices will gain an appreciation of nature.
B.H., Stoughton
A. Many people are taking up gardening during the quarantine. This is a rare opportunity for kids to discover this lifelong source of mental health and satisfaction, which “takes’’ best when introduced in youth (often by grandparents). My personal silver lining is being able to tune into the varied and cheering melodies of spring birds without the constant racket of cars and planes drowning them out.
But on to rhubarb! I enthusiastically suggest planting it if you have a sunny spot, because it is so early and easy. One of the few perennial vegetables, it’s a harbinger of spring. I have already been harvesting the red stalks for a month for jellies, pies, and even margaritas. My effortless 50-year-old patch is mulched with horticultural plastic and watered only during drought. Maybe you need to move yours to a sunnier location?
The roots can be reinvigorated by being dug up and divided in October or April every decade or so and replanted a yard apart in a bushel-basket-sized hole enriched with compost so the crown is an inch under the soil surface. You need only three stalks, or eyes, per plant and can give your extras away. But if this problem is new this year, it might just be due to our relatively long and damp spring weather.
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