Just chew on a stalk ;-)
Our plants are 6' tall in flowers right now, quite impressive, a side of rhubarb not too many people get to see...
People around here freeze it until strawberry season which is just around the corner, and then look out! ;[)
I shoulda remembered you before I decided not to post a reply to Tom earlier:
Hi Tom
Not 100% sure, but I think rhubarb needs cooler weather to grow. We've got plenty of that. The Mrs. is from WA state, she never had it either until she moved out east.
Tom
That's kind of funny because
Wiki says:
"...half of all US production is in Pierce County, Washington."
Now to be fair that's firmly seated in temperate rain forest west of the Cascade Range but east of the Cascades is extremely dry in comparison, arid and surprisingly hot summers in some areas to boot, more like high prairie grasslands.
Not good for rhubarb but great for things like apples, hops, and grapes.
In fact became the nation's leading producer of apricots and cherries after my beloved
Santa Clara Valley Pave-Over Project was finally completed in the '00's.
"The valley, named after the Spanish Mission Santa Clara, was for a time known as the Valley of Heart's Delight for its high concentration of orchards, flowering trees, and plants.
Until the 1960s it was the largest fruit producing and packing region in the world with 39 canneries.[1][2]"
Apple Computer even has a symbolic replanted orchard inside its Apple Park campus, known locally as "that alien thing that f----ed up all our traffic":
Apparently the irony escapes them.
That whole piece of land was covered with one huge cherry orchard when I was a kid, around 1965.
How do I know?
Because that street down in the lower right hand corner dead-ended where those houses stop, in fact, that section above 'em was orchard too, marked by the tree line surrounding that little residential section.
My best buddy lived in the house on the north side of the street at the dead-end.
You can imagine what we did in early summer when the cherries started getting ripe.
And the mustard used to grow so tall and thick in the spring you couldn't see 3 feet through it, or over it if you were less than 5 feet tall, either.
Oh well, nobody comes here for the food anymore, anyway.