don't do that Oh rhubarb is native to China it was brought to Europe and we can of my notes it was brought to Europe in the 1600s rhubarb is part of the buckwheat family it's an herbal remedy it's used as what's called a purgative which I think that means it um it cleans your intestinal system out I believe we eat it now we usually don't use it as a medicinal thing but you never know with this Danish now rhubarb rhubarb will grow in any garden soil but rhubarb really really loves manure this is an old dairy barn and this is the gizmo that they had to have the buckets come along there and it would dump them no right in this pile right here so the troughs would come out along this guide right to the end here and they would dump it and here now we've got some great rhubarb this is the flower stalk of rhubarb you generally want to cut this off because what you're doing is basically by growing all these seeds you're taking energy away from growing stalks and in rhubarb you eat the stock so that's what we want to grow well you can save seed from your rhubarb plant it but I you know it just grows like a weed anyway so I don't know if you want to do it fine but basically we just take then we cut the bottom of this thing off and then you just throw in your compost pile and it's set there's different kinds of rhubarb there's a rhubarb that has a really red stem ours here has kind of a greenish stem sometimes it has red at the bottom sometimes it's red all the way through you know it's kind of a coin toss there are different varieties but this rhubarb was growing here when we moved in and I got a little bit more from my neighbor down the road and I think it's the same plan I think it's called a variety called MacDonald but I could be wrong about that when you want a harvest rhubarb you pull it you don't you don't cut it you pull it at the base so you basically want to get down as close as you can to the base and you work this back and forth like this and it comes out let's see it comes out nice and clean this is the base of the stem and you can just take that pinch from that off you want to trim off the leaves the leaves are poisonous they're not deadly poisonous like people think at least in my opinion they have oxalic acid in them and it's high concentrations you can compost you can just chop it up putting your compost pile and it'll break down you want you you don't want your dogs eating it you don't want to eat it it'll probably make you ill I don't think they'll kill you but I'll give you a heck of a stomachache but this is what we want we're on a nice clean stalk will harvest a bunch of these and I will go into the kitchen and we'll cook something up hey put that down Hey so to melt butter I've never been very good at this but I'm doing it one-handed I take this I put in the microwave I bought these things at the food co-op what's your these little plastic Ecover things that keep things from melting and spitting all over the microwave so let's try this okay we'll say that's melted so all this goes in to a bowl and gets mixed we have a melted butter that's one stick of melted butter we got 1 cup of brown sugar 3/4 of a cup of oats and 1 cup of flour and 1 teaspoon cinnamon I use this tool it's called a fork I think it works really well and the fork works we've got an 8-inch square baking dish and we're going to butter it it's not too hard just rub it around oh man hey so we're going to take half of our oatmeal brown sugar butter flour cinnamon mixture and put that in the bottom we're gonna press that down we're gonna need four cups of sliced rhubarb there's no perfect way to measure rhubarb so I you know I just use the Pyrex and I guess at it put this in your mouth and chew okay we have one cup of sugar 1 cup of water 2 tablespoons of cornstarch I'm using arrowroot which is about the same thing it's just a little different I don't want to buy a whole big box of cornstarch so I just bought a little bag of arrowroot from the food co-op it works just as well I guess this is clear it doesn't look very clear but we're really what's happened is we dissolve the sugar in the water and put cornstarch in there so cornstarch is a thickener so you can see why you really can't tell but the X thick so we're going to pour this over our rhubarb mixture rhubarb is really tart so it needs a sweetener and sugar and brown sugar work really well for that so after we've added the sugar mixture we're going to add in the remaining butter oatmeal brown sugar mixture okay a 350 degree oven for 45 to 55 minutes and let's see what happens not bad a little bit too much look like we could have had it cook down a little bit more thing but I'm mmm that's really good