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Aunt Rebecca’s Rhubarb
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<h1>
Aunt Rebecca’s Rhubarb
</h1>
<aside>
This article was written by my grandfather (Dick Chase) and published on my father, Justin Chase’s, blog, “Outdoors, By Cracky!”.
My dad saved this article before the blogging platform went under.
I have preserved the content of the article, but updated the HTML for improved accessiblity and semantics.
</aside>
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<a href="rhubarb-large.png" aria-hidden="true"><img src="rhubarb.png" alt=""/></a>
<blockquote>Being Yankee—I've considered for years what it means and I have grown to
appreciate it is best explained in stories. I invited my dad to share with
us the story of my family's rhubarb and how it came to be his. It's a tale
of generations, of perseverance, and of really great rhubarb. It is also
quite Yankee. So too was the process of us working to bring it to you.
Enjoy.</blockquote>
<h2>Aunt Rebecca's Rhubarb</h2>
<p>by Dick Chase</p>
<p>By the summer of 1953, my grandfather Charlie's rhubarb planting had all
but disappeared; overtaken and crowded out by quackgrass. Quackgrass is an
invasive rhyzomniferous grass that kills crop plants. </p>
<p>
My Great Aunt Rebecca came to the rescue. Charlie prepared a new planting
site on the south side of his cow yard, incorporating plenty of well
composted manure. Rebecca provided the rhubarb divisions from her farm next
door. This planting thrived and Charlie sold his rhubarb to small
neighborhood grocers all over Newburyport - we're talking pre-supermarkets
here. </p>
<p>
In the late 1950s, my grandfather, well into his 80s, retired from farming.
Without care, the rhubarb planting slowly disappeared. My grandfather
passed away in 1963 and my Great Aunt Rebecca followed in 1966. </p>
<p>
In 1974 Rebecca's barn was destroyed by a windstorm. It was a beautiful old
barn, with white ash framing, dating from the late 1600s. She had milked
goats in that barn for most of her life and her brothers Will and Sam kept
their teams of horses there. They were teamsters and contract delivered
dories to Gloucester for Lowell's Boat Shop across the river on Amesbury's
Point Shore. I'm getting a bit off topic. </p>
<p>
When we started cleaning up the old barn, I discovered one of my great
aunt's rhubarb plants thriving in an old pile of composted goat manure. I
dug up the whole crown, divided it and planted the divisions at our farm on
the High Road in Newbury. For several years I kept dividing the plants
until I had about 2,000 beautiful plants with high yields every spring.</p>
<p>
Things went just fine in the rhubarb business until...in 1985 new neighbors
that had recently built expensive homes beside the Newbury farm filed suit
to prevent the enlargement of our farm market. As we preferred the location
of our older family farm up here on the Old Ferry Road anyway, we made the
business decision to sell the Newbury farm. </p>
<p>
Before we turned the place over to the new owners, I dug up a hundred or so
plants and moved them back to Arrowhead where I planted them in 1986. At
that time, we had no on-farm retail sales, and the neglected planting
started to go downhill. </p>
<p>
Every spring through the 1990s I planned to dig and replant some new rows,
but it was low on my priority list and with so much spring work to be done,
I never did get to the job. The field the rhubarb was in I eventually
seeded as a hayfield. </p>
<p>
Forward to Spring 2005 - the family has decided to open Arrowhead to the
public for retail sales and I wondered if any of the farm's original strain
of rhubarb was left (not likely, I felt). I visited the hayfield in late
April and checked the row of plants I had moved back from Newbury almost 20
years earlier. It didn't look promising and sadness crept into my heart.
But, almost to the end of the row I spied one plant with a few miniature
plantlets struggling in the grass. Our head greenhouse grower, John Wieck,
carefully separated the plants and potted them into 4" pots in the
propagation greenhouse. After a couple of divisions during that summer we
had 105 small plants for field planting in the fall. </p>
<p>
The current result is a beautiful planting of Aunt Rebecca's Rhubarb, now
growing in a field that was once part of her farm. This particular strain
of rhubarb was first planted at Arrowhead by my family around 1765, and the
plants we have now are directly descended clones of those first plants.
Rhubarb makes a delicious Spring sauce or pie, sweet and tart at once. As
has been the case for two centuries and a half, Aunt Rebecca’s Rhubarb
remains the first harvest of the year from the fields here at Arrowhead.
</p>
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<p>
You may contact Dick via his website: ArrowheadFamilyFarm.com. Thanks for
reading.
</p>
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<p><a href="#">Subscribe to Outdoors, By Cracky! by Email</a></p>
<p>**Please
take note: I, J. "Cracky" Chase, am not responsible for your actions or
well-being. My motto, "Follow Me!" is simply my motto and is not to be
taken literally. Any information or pictures I present are
representative of my personal opinions only. In fact, don't follow me.
That way you won't send your stupid lawyers after me if anything goes
wrong.</p>
<p>Copyright © 2014 Justin Chase. All Rights Reserved.</p>
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