How sweet it is: Rhubarb heralds in spring

Sugar Hill Farm's Allison Turcan shows off a freshly-picked rhubard plant. AMY SOWDER PHOTO

By AMY SOWDER

As the volunteers watched, the farmer at Sugar Hill Farm in Bedford Hills crouched down to the soil and wrapped her garden-gloved hand around the blushing stalk topped with leaves like fans. 

She yanked that stalk out of the dirt, turning it around under the 83-degree morning sunshine to admire her harvest.

“Rhubarb is one of the first things that pop up, the first sign of spring,” said Allison Turcan, the contract farmer for Sugar Hill, a food-pantry garden started by Westchester Land Trust in 2012. She also runs her own nonprofit teaching farm in North Salem called DIG Farm. “People usually associate rhubarb with strawberries because they come up around the same time. Rhubarb is first.”

Turcan works with hundreds of volunteers at Sugar Hill each year to grow, weed, harvest and weigh food that’s distributed through the Community Center of Northern Westchester. In 2025, the garden grew more than 2,175 pounds of fresh vegetables and herbs — that’s almost 11,000 servings — and donated it all to food pantries in Katonah and Mount Vernon.

“It’s not just giving fresh produce to pantries, where people may not know what to do with it,” said Jes Parker, director of communications for WLT, as she stood between rows of spinach speckled with violets. “She does a lot of food prep too, making ready-made meals.”

Any day now, greenish-pink stalks of tangy rhubarb pulled from this hill will likely be a part of those meals. Rhubarb is a hardy perennial in the buckwheat family (Polygonaceae). 

It’s a controversial culinary plant, as far as food-gardening goes. Some people grimace and call rhubarb a sour experience. Others smile, thinking about sweet pie pairings, and rave about its tangy taste.

The ancient Chinese used rhubarb as a medicinal herb more than 5,000 years ago. Native to southern Siberia, it got its name from the Russians who grew it along the Rha River (now the Volga). For centuries, rhubarb was traded alongside tea as a cure for stomach aches and fevers.

The English were the first to eat rhubarb, starting in the 17th century, they made a painful, sometimes fatal, mistake with the leaves that look like chard. 

“Even though the stalks are edible, the leaves are highly poisonous,” Turcan warned. “When you harvest them, pull the stalks out, cut the leaves off and leave them on the ground for ground cover and compost.”

Those leaves contain a toxic amount of oxalic acid, which can cause cramps, nausea and sometimes death when you eat them.

So — shocker — rhubarb disappeared from dining tables for a couple hundred years. But late 18th century Europeans discovered that the tart stalks were still good to eat, and it became a popular filling for, well, tarts. People affectionately called rhubarb the “pieplant.”

As a perennial, rhubarb returns each spring if you don’t harvest all of it the year before. “So that’s less work,” Turcan said.

While rhubarb can be easy to grow and relatively adaptable, consider planting it in a raised soil bed for good draining, a place that gets full sun, and leaves a lot of space for the leaves to grow. The large, smooth, heart-shaped leaves emerge from crown buds when temperatures rise above 40 degrees in early spring, growing 2-to-4 feet tall.

The redder the stalk doesn’t mean the sweeter the taste. But the sharp acidity mellows out when you cook it, so rhubarb is great cooked in pies, crumbles, bars and jams. Consider rhubarb also for chutneys and sauces on roasted meats.

Most people pair rhubarb with a sweeter mate, like strawberries, plus a hearty scoop of sugar. The pieplant adds a tart complexity that can prevent a cloying dessert. Parker likes to cut her a rhubarb stalk on the bias and make artistic shapes with it on top of her rhubarb-strawberry pies.

“People think, ‘Oh, it’s bitter and sour,’ but I like to make it with sugar and berries,” she said. “Then people are like ‘wow,’ and will be more open to trying new things. “It’s all in how you pair it.”

The Westchester Land Trust has protected more than 9,500 acres of land, 925 of which were conserved farmland across 16 properties. The nonprofit’s annual benefit event, Hope on the Hudson, is June 6 at the Center at Mariandale in Ossining, which has land that the trust has conserved. For more information, visit westchesterlandtrust.org.