hello welcome to Kate's Ag today i am in Ontario Canada at Lennox farms once again with Brian and
Bill so this is so exciting and we are standing in a forced rhubarb field which i actually filmed
used for forcing because we're like a two-year-old or at the most a three-year-old plant for forcing
in the buildings they seem to produce the best and this variety with the big seed stocks on it
is Victoria which is old English variety which I talked about in the wintertime
and it produces very green rhubarb it's quite
it doesn't look that appealing in the field it's pretty green but in the in the building of course
with no sunlight it's red as red as you probably saw in the youtube video when we did the forced
rhubarb and it's a very strong healthy plant so it's got lots of energy stored in it and it will
produce a good crop indoors that's really neat basically if it's 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 and do you have to
replace the roots inside every year we do that's why we have that's why we have this field here
for just for rootstock people drive by so we never pick your rhubarb or we we do pick some
uh we use this rhubarb actually for the wine for pressing but because it makes a nice color but uh
but uh we normally leave 10 or 15 acres here that we hardly even pick and people go you never touch
your rhubarb so that's root stock for our forced rhubarb building because we when we force rhubarb
that two or three or four acres we take out every fall it's gone it's it's used its energy up and
it's wasted when uh by springtime so we have to keep replenishing it so wow these are these
are three-year-old plants started they started out as a root about the size of my fist with
one eye on them this is a true family operation yep i'm the fifth generation and and dad's the
fourth and hopefully my kids will be the six well you know yeah they're a bit young yet so
that's so amazing i should have quit when i was a teenager my dad was explaining to me about picking
these rhubarb roots up and at that time they uh didn't have the machinery we have now and they dug
them with a plow and they picked them loose with a pickaxe when they partly froze to the ground
and i tried that the first one i said oh my god this is a horrible job but uh but we mechanized a
little bit and got it working better so it's and we have offshore workers that we keep for that
extra two weeks in the fall just to get the job done so that's not too bad i've been doing it for
40 years that's really awesome i'm fourth generation on our Montana farm and my dad grew
up with combines without cabs or air conditioning so i feel very lucky to have the luxury of both
yeah i know it's amazing how far technology is going i've spent lots of hours out of tractor
digging rhubarb roots and do other things in the freezing rain it's half snow half rain and it's
like man it's miserable out here and how long have you been growing forced rhubarb for uh
four generations the first uh member of our family came from England they didn't they didn't grow
rhubarb until my great-grandfather started growing at it so where my grandfather started growing it
so it was amazing so they actually actually started growing it in the early 1920s and they
came in around 1883 so so a very long time yeah still over a hundred years still a hundred years
growing forced rhubarb so is rhubarb your biggest crop that you grow on your farm pretty well yep
that's very cool yeah we grow so like i said we have about 90 acres of rhubarb then we do english
peas after rhubarb harvest is done so we'll start them in a few weeks we do about 50 acres of them
all hand-picked and then the brussels sprouts is about 15 acres to finish the year off in
October so and i also video Brussels sprout harvest here which was just so fun yep it's
nice it's a nice crop because it's it's fairly quick it's three four weeks and you're done and
then you get to work in the shop for a month or so and then it's Christmas time so it's
kind of a nice finish for us so yes and could you explain the main differences between forced
rhubarb and your traditional rhubarb grown in the field well forced rhubarb is a plant that
we've i said grew in the field for two or three summers and we don't harvest it because we want
all the strength we can into the plant yes and then we physically dig the roots out with a we
use a potato digger now instead of the plow like my grandfather used but uh would use the potato
there left them and lift them onto the wagon and haul them into the building and plant them in beds
and then leave them door leave them dormant leave the building cold leave the fans on
leave the doors open and so they have a dormant period until Christmas time and then we turn
on one building and then when that one's almost ready to harvest we turn the next one so we keep
turning on one after the other until late march and the last building gets turned on
so we started harvesting the first building in february mid-February and finished last
building uh 15th 20th of may and we're actually overlapping by week we'll pick a reward out of the
field by then and wow and rhubarb forced rhubarb has much smaller leaves of course smaller leaf
and very red very red color and the stalks are only half the size of these because it's
you're not actually growing it from the sunlight and the rain you're you're forcing what energy
we've stored in the roots so when you put the roots in doors do you have to water them at all
uh when we're ready to turn the heat on we go a few days later after the thought out we
and we actually use a high pressure nozzle on the hose and wash all the top wash top of every
root so you put on a pair of high boots and a pair of uh wet a wetsuit because it's the mud
in the water splashing all over you and it's a cold job because it's only 10 degrees celsius in
there or 50 fahrenheit and they spend the whole day or day and a half washing the roots all down
and then we leave them until the rhubarb starts to grow about three weeks later and once the rhubarb
gets four inches high and there's little white hair roots coming on the plants and then they're
ready to start taking moisture so then we start watering once a week okay this is so amazing um
i've never known that you could grow forced rhubarb before well it's a little technology
that's been around since the 1700s and there used to be quite a few growers at one time
in Ontario here and actually West Coast of the U.S. and but uh there's gonna be less and less
are you the biggest producer of forced rhubarb in Ontario in Ontario we're the only producer left in
Ontario yeah really yeah so we're probably largest in Canada one time there's about 70 growers in
the 1940s yeah maybe not quite that many but quite a few why so many operations stopped
um well the oil crunch in the 70s and the price of fuel went up and that's that's what that's what
knocked quite a few of them out they just said that said i'm fed up with this so i'm not paying
the extra cost for fuel and a lot of them got older the next generation like i'm fortunate i got
a son that wants to take over but a lot of farmers their next generation isn't taking over anymore so
when they're finished that's it the farm shuts down and it's sold and there's nobody growing
rhubarb anymore for partly for that reason too well also you can get fresh fruits and vegetables
from all over the world now whereas in the 1930s and 40s you might had oranges at Christmas time
and you had fresh rhubarb that was grown locally in the sheds right so everything else is out of
storage repairs and apples and fresh rhubarb out of the buildings definitely well this has been so
interesting thank you so much are you welcome you're welcome thank you so much for watching
today's video i hope you learned a little bit more about forced rhubarb and what it entails to grow
it so a huge thank you to you for for showing me about your operation well thanks for coming again
thanks again for coming you're very welcome and if you'd like to learn more about Lennox Farms yeah
you can check our website out www.lennoxfarm.ca and we have a lot of history on there and uh about
everything we grow and we have an online store if you want to check that out as well so and you
can also come and pick up some delicious rhubarb that's right make sure to like and subscribe bye