Cooking with the edible stems of rhubarb requires a sweetening with sugar or honey to lift its taste. Many kitchen gardeners and cooks will agree that forcing rhubarb over the winter months, for some varieties of Rheum x cultorum, is a valuable way of getting rhubarb crowns to produce more tender and sweeter stems for eating earlier in the season. There are two main forcing techniques for rhubarb in the kitchen garden.

Forcing Techniques for Rhubarb

Forcing rhubarb can be achieved by two techniques:

  1. Lifting the rhubarb crown out of the ground and exposure
  2. Covering the rhubarb crown with a rhubarb forcer

Forcing rhubarb by lifting the crown and exposure can be done at any time when a temperature of between 15 to 17 degrees Celsius or 59 to 62 degrees Fahrenheit can be achieved for the growing season. Initial preparation for forcing by lifting is to leave the rhubarb crowns exposed after lifting from a Saturday to the following weekend's Sunday (around 8 days).