Force is with us for rhubarb celebration
Wakefield Rhubarb Festival is back for 2022. Wakefield Council’s celebration of the district’s most famous vegetable returns to paint the city pink from February 25-27.
What more is there to say? Life, thankfully, in these days of virus, is returning to some sort of normalcy.
Coinciding with the growing season, which in the ‘Rhubarb Triangle’ (a ninesquare-mile area between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell) involves special sheds and a process known as ‘forcing’, the festival brings the city centre to life over three days. With a full programme of chef demos, family workshops and of course, the famous food and drink market.
Those are the words of Wakefield Council and I, for one, cannot thank them enough because I love rhubarb and all it
has come to represent in this wonderful county of ours.
That ‘Rhubarb Triangle’, a small area of land between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell, in West Yorkshire, has kept alive one of the finest vegetables (most folk think of it as a fruit) known to man.
Rhubarb rootstock is grown outdoors before being taken into ‘forcing’ sheds where the plants put on a prodigious amount of tender growth – the fruit which ends up on our plates in the likes of rhubarb crumble.
Should you ever be driving up the M1 towards Leeds, seek out the ‘forcing’ sheds – where this very old and specialist industry is based. Inside those long, low buildings, in the dark, rhubarb grows at a furious rate.
The common gardener needn’t go to such extreme lengths to grow his or her own rhubarb – it’s one of the easiest crops to raise. Just plant crowns (mature roots) in a sunny, well-dug, manure-rich site, and a year later, you should be pulling fresh, succulent sticks from March until the end of May, and making pies, crumbles, jams and chutneys.