Early June in Edmonton is rhubarb season.
Because it’s a cold-weather loving crop, Edmonton grows rhubarb so well. It’s a hardy survivor. In some prairie places, a pioneer homestead has been built, lived in, left and vanished beneath the waving native grasses, and the only way you can tell anyone has ever lived there is the patch of rhubarb still growing in what used to be a garden.
Rhubarb makes me nostalgic for all the childhood summer days I spent eating a stalk right out of the garden, with a friend, dipping the sour-chewed end in a little dish of sugar, while using the huge leaf as a parasol and puckering up.
At our next Sprouts workshop, we’re going to make some of these:
Rhubarb leaf stepping stones: if you can’t make the workshop and want to give them a try, here’s an easy, kid-friendly tutorial.
I’d be remiss not to include my favourite rhubarb recipe which is, of course, for Classic Strawberry Rhubarb Pie.
I made it on the BBQ so the house wouldn’t get too hot. Divine.
