hello welcome to Kate's Ag today i'm here in Ontario Canada with Bill French of Lenox farms
the same farm that i got to see brussels sprout harvest at so this is just incredible thank you
and now you're going to be showing me rhubarb harvest yep
we've been wearing rhubarb for uh four generations in my family i've been doing it for 45 years
so uh my son's been with us now for almost 20 years i guess 15 years anyway so uh
the tradition is continuing next generation and we grow rhubarb in the dark here and which are
two or three-year-old plants so that we've grown in the field of a variety that came from England
called Victoria and we have some variety one the other buildings are actually Sutton so we have
two varieties we use but this first building we use Victoria because it grows faster in the cold
weather so and these varieties we don't know the Victoria especially we don't pick in the
summertime it's too green has huge leaves the size of an elephant's ear and uh and as you can
see in the dark here there's almost no leaf at all because there's no sunlight to make it grow
it's actually called forced rhubarb you're taking the energy of the plant that we've
put into the plant the last two seasons of the field and uh first first forced rhubarb in the
dark well i'm very excited for the tour trying to pick everything average around 18 to 24 inches
so anything less than 18 inches we leave for next Wednesday basically but still if it's longer than
up above my elbow i'll pick it but anything a little shorter i leave it for next week
so we're picking picking on the average every four to five days grows at least an inch a day
if they got a twist on them like that with twisted that's considered a number two grade
usually and do you put the soil in here well i came in with the roots uh these are these are
three-year-old plants started they started out as a root about the size of my fist one eye on
them and we plant them in the field to grow them for for two summers or in this case three summers
because we missed one year with colder planting unfortunately and then by the time they're three
years old they'll have about six or seven eyes on them they'll be almost a foot across do they keep
reproducing in this field yeah they keep coming up every year in the field fielder just keep feeding
the fertilizer and making sure they got water hopefully they get enough rain on them yes trying
to build up and strengthen plants so this right here we don't pick it at all in the field because
we want to build strength into the root when this crop is finished the roots are actually soft it's
just like a potato that you leave under the sink oh wow that grows the sprout and the potatoe gets
soft it's the same same idea all the new buildings have computerized fans and they're nothing but a
grief like they're always broken and this one here is the oldest one that's 25 years old it's all
manual controls it never gives trouble now the reason the fan's running is to
is to keep the air moving because you start getting the sign these side shoots like uh
turning black and you don't want that block to spread through the whole cross this is soft you
can feel that with your fingers yes i didn't see it's like a sucker shoot on the side of the plant
so that wouldn't be something that it's not marketable it's garbage so that's why you see
little piles all the way down because i'm picking the garbage out and tossing in piles yeah the idea
is you have to water every week but um we have to keep the leaves dry or else we get the mildew in
them and they if you get black through all the leaves you pretty well lost the crop right so
that's why we keep the fans running all the time what time of year do the rhubarb come in here
we dig all the roots in the fall in late october so the roots all come in in october we leave the
doors open on the building and until christmas time we let it all freeze oh okay so we leave the
building cold well we close up all the buildings when the weather starts getting bad in December
sometimes we'll leave the fan on to bring cold air in this building here we start it after Christmas
so between Christmas and New Year's we turn the heat on set it for 10 degrees Celsius about
three or four days later once it's all thawed out uh with bring a hose with a spray nozzle
we've washed the top of every plant so it's a time type of consuming job takes a whole day to do the
building which isn't bad very labor intensive but it's it's boring he's standing there with a hose
washing every plant off of the with a pressure nozzle on the end of the hose right it has to
be clean for when the rhubarb grows or else you have dirt all over the rhubarb of course it gets
the dirt down around the side of the roots where the where the little hair roots come from and then
so the so the plant can suck up the moisture again because the rhubarb has a lot of water
in it so it has to have it has to be watered every week this is just amazing i've never seen
rhubarb growing before yeah it's different than out in the field completely different
well i've seen it in the garden but not in this setting yeah the roots are all packed and close
together obviously to get a higher population in the building to get production so and once
you pick the rhubarb will it come back again well for a second picking this year oh it produces uh
about seven sticks off each eye so there's an eye down there's an eye
here there's a stick coming and there'll be another one down there and there's this one
there's probably been one picked already off this side you can see a little bit there it has
been picked already so so each eye will produce about seven sticks so it'll pretty it'll pick for
seven or eight weeks oh wow seven or eight pickings we pick about every five days so
it'll pick for six weeks say and this is the root system that's the system and you can see
the little white hair but we saw it growing trying to pick up the water right as we water the water
oh very interesting it's trying to grow of course but it's in the dark so how long would it take
one of these to come up um well after we turn the heat on about a week they'll start swelling up and
in two weeks you'll see an eye like this it takes about five four to five weeks before the
first sticks are ready to pick next building's only three inches high it's coming along but
it'll start and it'll come faster because as we get closer to spring it's had its full dormant
period so it wants to grow whereas the first ones that came in they're still sleeping right they
they don't really want to wake up so you got to turn the heat on and encourage them for a
while but the ones in the next buildings they're gonna they're gonna take off fast so they'll take
four weeks or less to before they're ready to pass this one's about six weeks and what is the process
of harvesting them well it's all hand harvest so basically one stick at a time you put your finger
down put your finger down to use the light you need to put your finger down in the side inside
of the stalk to the bottom and give it a little twist just like picking an apple and you kind
of hear it you kind of hear it break off if you pull on it you pull on it won't come right it's
stuck it's fastened fastened really good to the plant so you have to you have to twist them off
i'll show you this one so you get your finger there you hear it break and you give it a twist
like that and then off it comes so it's labor intensive because you're picking one at a time
yes good put your finger down and twist it you put your finger pointed that through the bottom
and so it kind of breaks it a bit you'll hear it kind of break free and turn at the same time
there we go oh like that and the problem is if you pull on it you end up breaking this whole
eye off and then you know and then you lose well you're you're good that's what you want
okay that's just garbage see the problem is if people if they're not
picking properly and they go pull on it it'll break the whole eye off and then you lose six
more sticks for the next few weeks right so that would be very bad so these two are both oh yeah
oh this one's a little bit bigger
did that then once you get on to it you know like i've done this for 45 years so and so you
make sure it's longer than your arm yeah i just up as long as above my elbow is the right length so
it's probably not good that's a sucker fan so i'll show you how soft it is see if you're not wearing
gloves you can mark it really easy oh yeah because it's really it's really tender so you have to be
very gentle gentle with it you hold it cradled in your arm and then you discard those there yeah
that's why i wear gloves because otherwise your fingernails might touch the stock and market right
and then the rhubarb come over here yeah then we bring it in and these boxes are on the table
do you sort the rhubarb into different boxes depending on their size yeah this is the number
one grade that's number one grade so that's the top quality yeah this is number two grade
so number two grade is thinner it doesn't have to be as long or it has a twist in it
find one on the table i don't see one at the moment but do you just have two grades yeah well
we have anything that's marked we throw up there as uh we used to consider it garbage but we cut
it out we cut it up and sell it by the pound of people so you have people people are about
watching a lot of cheaper stuff so we'll take that so it'll have a so you have a use for all
of the rhubarb yeah and none of it goes to waste so it'll have a scar on it like that so it just
see where it grew it cracked yes so we just take a knife and trim that off and cut it up and and then
sell it by the pound in a bag what percentage of your rhubarb crop would you say is grade one
or does it vary it varies but we usually get about 85 percent number ones and about 15 percent number
two so let's say 14 number two is 1 percent garbage or 1 percent call outs oh that's really
great then that we call it that we then of course all the garbage on the ground in there but we
don't consider that yeah it's just part of it just part of doing business right would this be the
traditional way of growing rhubarb for pretty well sale pretty well we started and started in
France in the 1700s and he grew in caves really used candlelight to work because it didn't have
electricity rhubarb never really got popular until then because there was no sugar once the sugar
trade started from the Caribbean they started bringing sugar back to Europe from the Caribbean
and then people started experimenting with different recipes and tried rhubarb and of
course to start getting popular because they found out it was quite edible when it wasn't when it had
sugar added to it so people didn't like it so much when it was bitter that's amazing and you sell all
of the rhubarb in your store all goes no it goes to toronto to the Ontario Food Terminal oh okay
so uh probably 95 goes to the Ontario Food Terminal about five percent maybe get sold here
we have two or three people pick up and uh and we have a few retail sales
at our stores do you ever sell to restaurants we do we had someone come in last week about 10 cases
and they cut it up and put in their freezer and use it for their recipes that's amazing and this
is so fresh as well and we sell the number twos these number twos go to a company called Hundred
Kilometer Foods and they pick up they pick up and deliver restaurants so they take usually 15 or
18 boxes every week but it usually pretty well everything we've got and how long does rhubarb
harvest usually last uh we usually start around valentine's day in the middle of February and uh
each building will last for six weeks and so when this building started picking we turn the heat
on in the second building and it's gonna start picking by the first April and we turn the heat on
first April the third building and it comes really fast it'll start picking by the third
week in April it comes in three and a half weeks or something wow and then it only picks for three
weeks it just all comes at once so we pick the last building until about the 16th or 18th of May
and then we have rhubard in the field after that so so it gives us rhubarb from February till May
and right in right into the outdoor crop and the leaves are very small so the more sunlight
a rhubarb plant has the bigger the leaves will once things get bigger and the stocks get greener
in the building there's no sunlight so the goal is to have the lights off and as much as possible
yeah the old core is obviously the 1700s they used to pick my candlelight in England they picked my
candle without having the larger leaves do you notice you get a bigger rhubarb crop no
no we actually get less oh we get less of that field this one this one returned the heat on
about two and a half weeks ago this will be the next rhubarb prop you harvest yeah
there might be a little bit ready in 10 days two weeks anyway and how long have you been growing
for but the heat was turned on in the air um middle of February late February i guess so it's
been on for three weeks and what do you do with the rhubarb once you're done harvesting them just
to start to take it back out the field they came and run a disc through them and chew them all up
so this will be your last rhubarb harvest crop yeah this is the one that we're picking today
so we're gonna turn the heat on next week and uh
it wants to grow you see how some of the eyes are starting up already oh it is
that's amazing i have to get that board back up if i keep it cool in here and what temperature
do you turn when we run the heat that's 10 10 degrees celsius 10 or 11. and then you have onion
potatoes out of the market there one of the big ones we got are these huckleberry gold so we're
going to have to plant them cut them up plan for seed i'm now here with Diane French and i
absolutely love rhubarb pie and rhubarb and baking so can you explain how forest rhubarb is a little
bit different okay well with the forest rhubarb you use i use half the sugar that i would with the
field rhubarb um and cooking time is not as long as the outdoor rhubarb and obviously the color
is is a lot nicer i find than the outdoor rhubarb when you're baking with it
this time of year i bake a lot of muffins with it and it's known as a spring tonic for a reason so
if you have issues rhubarb is good to eat that's very cool what are some of your favorite goods
to bake with rhubarb well i make a it's a rhubarb square it's like date squares only uh you have the
rhubarb in the middle that sounds delicious i do a lot of squares rhubarb crisps rhubarb strawberry
crisp pies muffins pies are fantastic they are yeah i try not to bake as much because we don't
need it but of course when the rhubarb's in season it's uh it's good when you bake with it what was
so nice meeting you thank you so much to meet you thank you well growing forest rhubarb started
in the 1700s in France and they started growing in caves uh using candlelight to see to pick it
and it really got popular by the 1800s when the flow of sugar was quite available
from the Caribbean before that time without sugar rhubarb wasn't really consumed and of
course it became quite a craze through most of Europe and it was there's a lot of lot growing
in England and there still is there's an area called the Rhubarb Triangle in Wakefield around
Wakefield England that still grows quite a bit of rhubarb and it's quite popular in the Netherlands
and France wow that's very interesting and then as growers people came to Canada like
my great-grandfather being English they started growing rhubarb here in Canada in my grandfather's
time in the 1920s up until the 40s there was 43 growers growing rhubarb here in Ontario but it's
now dwindled down to uh just us we're the only one the only grower left still forcing rhubarb and
we've been doing it for uh five generations now so a true family operation yeah that's right so
there's a little history on where rhubarb came from for forcing in the wintertime that's very
cool thank you so much for watching today's video make sure to like and subscribe and i hope you
learned a little bit more about how your rhubarb gets to your table and a huge thank you to Lennox
Farm for the wonderful opportunity to tour your awesome operations and where can people find you
or learn more about your farm okay uh we do have a website that you can go on it's lennoxfarms.ca
and we do have a self-serve farm market there
that's amazing thank you so much you're welcome and thank you so much for watching bye