Well then it’s a good thing I didn’t say that.
Sounds like you’re randomly reading all the wrong books and then carrying around this bitter baggage when they don’t magically rearrange the letters on their pages like a Harry Potter gardening book in order to conform to your particular back yard. Go online, google the “south carolina horticulture” or find someone at the nearest university or botanic gardens or something, and find some less frustrating sources of information.
My grandmother had a big ol’ rhubarb plant in her backyard here in extreme north Texas when I was a kid. It grew along the back fence and I guess it got dug up when the fence got replaced (along with most of the black currant bushes). Those were 2 of my favorite pies, rhubarb and currant (not together). They also had 30 some odd tart cherry trees that made magnificent pies. I have just enough currants left to munch on, the bushes don’t spread very fast. All of the rhubarb and cherries are gone.
You know, Zsofia, I feel I have to point out to you: you live in South Effing Carolina. Some people live in Chicago, you realize, and North Dakota, where you can grow three things: hostas, grasses, and dirt. You can grow almost anything in South Carolina. Instead of focusing on the parts of general books that talk about the MINORITY of plants that you can’t grow, and letting that make you pissy, you should be down on your knees thanking the gardening gods that place South Carolina near the very, very top of the list most versatile gardening clients in the continental US. Fine, rhubarb doesn’t thrive for you. (Pointing out again that, despite your reaction, I never said it would.) But you know what? The list of things that WILL grow for you FAR outweighs the list of things that won’t. The ratio is completely inverted for most of the Midwest.
Anyone who lives in South Carolina and complains about feeling slighted by the gardening gods, well, shouldn’t be gardening. You should do the noble thing and switch places with someone who lives in Chicago and plants a new rhododendron or hydrangea or buddleia every year, determined that this is the year they’re gonna get it right and it WILL thrive. You know you can’t hardly grow roses in the Midwest without treating them like profoundly retarded children that need to be spoonfed and diaper changed every 2 hours? It’s a fulltime job, keeping a tearose alive in the midwest. Ditto, as I said, rhodies and hydrangeas and buddleias. You can’t grow boxwood, or japanese maples, or chaemecyparis, or acanthus (yes, I realize there are exceptions and microclimates), or so many other things that you take for granted in SC. When I was doing landscape design in Chicago, you think I wouldn’t have traded my damn rhubarb for any of these other plants?
And read any general gardening book: they take ALL of those plants as standard; those are all gardening staples. But you can’t grow most of them in most of the Midwest.
So, ending my pissy hijack here, count your blessings and find some more locally relevant information.
Clients? Clients?!?
Sheesh.
Climates.
lissenrer, pissy hijacks have no place here. Cool it.
For everyone, please notethat this is Cafe Society. A discussion about rhubarb recipes is fine. A discussion about where rhubarb grows and in which climates and what’s used as fertilizer, belongs in GQ. So, this whole discussion is really a hijack.
Back to recipes, OK?
[/Moderator hat off] I’m allergic to the damn stuff. I hope I don’t break out because of having to read this thread.
If it’s not too late to return to the subject, on a cruise ship I once had a rhubarb thing with lemon curd involved. In fact, it’s the first time I tried rhubarb. It was sort of cheesecake-ish, as I recall. Any favorite recipes for that combination?