Garden Studios

One of the tastiest potential puddings is rhubarb – although strictly speaking it’s a vegetable – and late October or November is the time to organize for next year’s crop.

If you already grow rhubarb you could improve its yield by removing leaves and stalks turned black by cold nights to show its crown to frost, since it needs cold to advertise new growth.

Rhubarb must be divided every three or four years to eliminate the non-productive old portion of the crown, so if yours is getting a piece big and bland carefully dig it up and take a spade to it.

Use the spade to chop it in half, or into healthy-sized sections which have two or more buds on it.

These might want to be replanted pretty quickly so that they don’t dry out, but first dig over the soil to get some air into it and take away this summer’s crop of weeds.

Then add some home-made compost to the soil to enhance drainage. In the event you don’t make your individual compost a minimum of dig a hole where you desire the rhubarb to head and line the base with that day’s vegetable peelings and tea bag.

Cover these with a skinny layer of soil then plant the rhubarb so the buds are above ground, then firm it into place.

If you don’t need all of the rhubarb sections you’ve got created plant the spares in plastic pots and provides them in your friends, and in case you don’t have any rhubarb tell your pals it’s time they divided theirs.

Alternatively, you should buy a couple of crowns to plant out before winter.

They must go in a sunny spot and kept well watered while they become established, but when you’re buying small crowns don’t harvest them until their second year so that they have time to accumulate their energy reserves.

Anybody who’s already getting a chunk bored to death with stewed apple or pears could put money into a rhubarb forcer – a terracotta bell-shaped pot – which you pop over your rhubarb in spring on the first sign of life.

This makes the rhubarb grow faster since it is attempting find some light, and it’ll be sufficiently big to eat about six or eight weeks when you cover it.

Heaping straw or bubble wrap across the forcer can help you to maintain the rhubarb warm and able to eat even sooner.

So will probably be goodbye apple pie next spring and hello rhubarb and custard.