GIVE RHUBARB PLENTY OF FOOD

If you’ve planted your rhubarb crowns, but forgotten how important it is to establish a rich, nutritious bed that they can draw from as they grow and produce tasty stalks for your eating pleasure, don’t despair; you can feed those ruby rhubarbs retrospectively. At a garden I visited just this week, the enthusiastic gardeners had planted their rhubarb into poor, undernourished soil and were anguishing over their predicament, but cheered up when they learned that side dressings of mature animal manure, of which they had heaps, would do the same job as the buried ‘‘treasure’’usually assigned to rhubarb: roadkill or something from the farm that had expired during the spring birthing period. If your garden features worms, they’ll do the work of dragging that gloopy nutrient mix down to the root zone of your rhubarb and the sweet-stalk-producing perennial will respond to that treatment by throwing up thick stems suitable for wonderful breakfasts and desserts. having wintered under the soil as a tight crown, are unfurling now and rising up to catch light for the perennial herb that is so useful to gardeners like myself, who value the deep-rooting wonder for the nutrient-mining that it does. If you want more of what is a very