Rhubarb washington state

Stop by Cascade Regional Blood Center and donate critical blood if you can. Walk or bike the Sumner Link Trail. Thank you to everyone who helped make this years Street of Treats such a fun and safe celebration of Halloween! Thank you to everyone who helped make this years Come Walk With Me another amazing event. A beautiful morning and over 2, walkers made this year the biggest and best ever! It was a great day in Sumner! Of course, weather changes, season variations, variety of a crop planted and other factors profoundly affect the dates, so this is a general guide only.

The following pear harvest chart should cover western Washington. Choose the earlier date for southwest Washington and the later date for more northerly or colder areas. Above is the version of the Ball Blue Book. Toggle navigation. I leave rhubarb danishes to local bakeries, but use it in coffeecake, muffins, crisp and pie throughout the year.

Try adding a handful of raspberries or blueberries instead, for a huge textural improvement over sluggy baked strawberries. Chopped very finely and seasoned with red onion and mustard seed, it makes a fine pickle or chutney. And stewed rhubarb is far tastier than its humble name implies: go savory with a bit of fresh thyme to serve with mild cheeses, or go sweet, combining it with anything from candied ginger to sliced kumquats, to eat with ice cream or pancakes or use as a filling between cake layers.

Either version freezes well. Increasingly, Northwest cidermakers add rhubarb to seasonal ciders, where it adds a pretty pink color and mild, herbaceous tartness — at home, you can juice it and combine with lemonade or elderflower syrup and seltzer for alcohol-free refreshment. That solitary plant came to me via a friend, unsurprising news to anyone who has had a Seattle-area garden. The only thing you have to do to rhubarb once you have a plant is dig it up every five years to divide it, breaking off smaller crowns and forcing them on friends and relations with garden plots.

My friend and I are reasonably sure our variety is Victoria, a predominantly green variety which produces an enormous crop each year as long as the flowers are cut off. Rhubarb produces rather avant garde flowers on cylindrical stalks if left to its own devices; they look a little like an undersized head of cauliflower has been glued onto a green and pink baton.

As far as color goes, green rhubarb is less pretty than those radish-pink varieties, and it needs a little longer to cook completely, but the flavor is cleaner, less minerally.

If all you care about is gorgeous color, look for Colorado Red — its stalks are vibrantly fuchsia all the way through. It looks more like chard than anything else, but its closest relatives are sorrel and buckwheat.

The part of it we eat is the petiole, a particular type of stalk; the other widely-eaten petiole is celery the two are totally unrelated. So, rhubarb is absolutely a vegetable.