My great grandfather, grandfather, and father all grew rhubarb commercially, originally bringing live crowns with them from England to Australia. In my trials, all English types die after a few years, as our winters are not cold enough to reset them. How they got anything to survive I do not know! With experience the only true English type to survive in my climate is “Victoria”, a vigorous green winter deciduous type. Rhubarb farmers almost without exception never sold, traded, or gave away their types. It was a closed shop. When I was a boy in the 1940’s, 1950’s, my father grew many, many acres of rhubarb, taking up to 5,000 bunches a day into market. The clone he grew was sterile, never producing one fertile seed from the thousands of seed stalks they grew annually.
When I started to grow rhubarb again in about 2010 I sourced every clone I could find worldwide, both crowns and seed. Some thrived, and some sulked and died. But soon I had a vast pool of types to pick from, and some produced fertile seed. I collected and sowed this seed by the 1,000’s. Rhubarb seed grows about 90% true to type, 5% inferior, and 5% superior. The superior 5% I planted out in long beds, ruthlessly culling anything that did not meet my exacting standards. Some types were too brittle to pick, some were just too big. What can you do commercially with 2 metre long stalks, and the slightest wind destroys them. Some are non-commercial as the Supermarkets have strict specifications as to size - not too big, not too small.
And now to sugar content. In the selection process, I measure all new types with a ‘Brix’ refractometer for their sugar content. Sugar content too low – CULLED! Out they go, no matter what they look like. 1,000’s of plants are discarded annually. The problem I have now is that I have just too many good ones. In fact, 100’s of brilliant new types all waiting to be named and commercialized, and the differences are so slight, only an expert could tell them apart. What to do with them? Well I have planted them out in rows of brilliant mixed plants, not all the same, but stunning, and have named them “BEST OF THE BEST”. Every year they will get better as I continue this ruthless selection process.