I found a website that describes it, and it is interesting.
Specifically, it’s noted that rhubarb thrives in cold, wet weather which, jokey stereotypes aside, is pretty much what the weather is like in Britain for several months of the year. In addition, it’s noted that rhubarb grows especially well in nitrogen rich soil which is also quite handily found in abundance in Britain.
This all brings us to the whole candlelit harvesting thing. At some point, farmers realised that rhubarb’s trademark tartness could be eliminated if the plant was grown in the dark at a certain stage, and that the act of doing this actually made the stalks of the plant taste sweet, negating the need for sugar to be added to dishes containing it.
With this information in hand, farmers quickly developed and subsequently refined the process of growing rhubarb in the dark. For example, it was eventually realised that rhubarb could be “forced” to grow by subjecting an immature plant to frost, which nobody had ever really tried before since frost is normally a death sentence for many plants. However, with rhubarb, this merely, as one rhubarb expert notes, “makes the rhubarb crown break its winter dormancy and stimulate the conversion of starch stored in the rhubarb crown to glucose”.
Normally this glucose is used by the entire plant during growth. However, by putting the rhubarb in total darkness at a certain stage, the leaves of plant will be anaemic and wilted, resulting in all of that delicious glucose being left in the plant’s stalk, hence why rhubarb grown in this manner is so much sweeter than rhubarb grown via more traditional means.
Naturally, once this was discovered, farmers began growing rhubarb in specially constructed “forcing sheds” which were kept in total darkness and kept warm by whatever means they had available. Prior to this, the rhubarb was and still is simply left in a field for around two years to allow the roots to grow while periodically being covered in nitrogen rich fertiliser. In the 18th century, the fertiliser used was mostly manure and something known as shoddy (essentially discarded woolen fibres) sourced from wool manufacturers. Today, however, farmers mostly use manure which in addition to being cheap and plentiful, stops thieves stealing the rhubarb.
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