I HAVE a taste for pink Champagne at this time of year.

Truth to tell I like the liquid version at any time but now is the time to taste the fruits of my ‘forcing’ rhubarb of that name.

Over four years ago when I gave up my Sandlands allotment for pastures nearer home I took a couple of rather neglected crowns and installed them in my new patch.

After splitting them with a spade over the years I now have eight, which gives me the option of forcing them in rotation — something that needs to be done because the act takes a lot of vitality from the crown.

I regularly return to recommending that rhubarb has a place in every patch or patio — in a pot — because as well as the stalks being delicious, the jumbo leaves look great.

For years, rhubarb got the culinary cold shoulder and it was really only people of my mother’s generation who knew that it was jolly good — and good for you too.

In more recent times, cheffy types have caught-on leading to a re-birth of interest in its tangy taste and rejuvination of that famous English historic centre of expertise, the Rhubarb Triangle in Yorkshire.

Potted crowns are readily available from garden centres; I recommend the aforementioned heritage variety, Champagne, and Strawberry Surprise AGM, a moderately recent introduction.

A new crown can be planted at any time of year and should be established in fertile, well-manured soil for a couple of years before forcing.

In winter or early spring cover the entire crown with a tub, large pot or (expensive) terracotta rhubarb forcer, excluding all light.

The stems should take about six weeks before they become large enough to harvest.

Due to the lack of light, plants, and especially the leaves, will be pale as they need sunlight to produce chlorophyll to make them green.

Not producing it makes the stems sweeter and the lack of light makes them taller quicker, slender and tender too.

  • Is rhubarb fruit or veg?

Despite US courts designating it fruit to save importers tax dollars, it is botanically classed as a vegetable, grown from cultivated plants in the genus Rheum in the family Polygonaceae.

But, in cooking, it is — as we all know — treated as a fruit.

                                                                            TOP TIPS

  • Prune the jolly, yellow winter-flowering jasmine, Jasminum nudiflorum, after blooms have died back.
  • Cut back shrubs, such as cornus and salix cultivars colourful winter stems down to ground level.
  • Prune summer-flowering clematis towards the end of the month before active growth begins.
  • There is still just time to prune apple and pear trees to shape before bud-break. But, leave plums, cherry trees and apricots until the summer as pruning these now will make them susceptible to Silver Leaf disease.
  • Cut back the old foliage from ornamental grasses before growth begins. Clip them to within a couple of inches from the ground.
  • Prune overwintered fuchsias back to one or two buds on each shoot. If your geraniums have survived winter, cut back any dead and leggy stems.