Into the Rhubarb

A sweary strawberry rhubarb crumble recipe from my dad

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Recently, I bought my wife roses. We love the look and the smell, but lamented how they die so fast. It reminded me of a meme that shows a rose at the top, saying “Roses: The pH of my soil is too high. I am going to die.” Below that is a picture of a dandelion pushing through the sidewalk. The caption says, “Dandelions: FUCK YEAH CONCRETE!”

Rhubarb is like dandelions.

The patch in the photo is behind my fence, in the back alley. Size 12 Crock for scale. I can’t believe it lived. Not only lived, but thrived.

It was about a dozen or so years ago, my father was visiting and he brought three small stocks of rhubarb from his home in northern British Columbia. The shit grows everywhere there, often in ditches at the side of the road. When he was teaching me to drive his beat up old Ford truck with a manual 4-speed transmission on a gravel road when I was twelve, he’d say things like “Try to keep it out of the fucking rhubarb, will ya?”

So, he brought me this rhubarb. I was like, okay. The fuck am I supposed to do with this? I’m not a gardener like my father. My thumb is black like the plague, not green. Only ask me to look after your plants if you want them to die.

I took a small shovel and dug some little holes behind the fence. It was half dirt, half gravel. Not the kind of soil that gave me any confidence in this plant’s ability to survive. I spent all of five minutes on the task. Then I forgot about it. I never watered it or anything. You’re on your own, rhubarb.

The year after I planted it the next-door neighbors decided to have a garage built in their backyard. For a couple of weeks some contractor’s Dodge Ram PlanetKiller XL repeatedly drove over and parked on top of the wee struggling rhubarb plants, grinding them into oblivion.

They still didn’t fucking die.