Healthy gardening – How to prepare rhubarb manure

Prepare your own rhubarb manure – Down with aphids!

The rhubarb is a very interesting plant. Often used in sweet dishes, it is considered as a fruit when it is actually a perennial vegetable which is appealing both for the garden and the gardener.

You will use only the stalks in the kitchen. But do you know that the leaves are useful too? Not in the plate (even if my goat Zilla does love them a lot) but in the garden as manure, especially as an insecticide against black aphids and the leek moth or as a pesticide against slugs.

How to prepare your rhubarb manure

• Harvest about 1.5 kg of rhubarb leaves.
• Put them in a big plastic container (such as a garden bin) and roughly cut them
• Pour 10 L of water on it – ideally rainwater (it’s better, free and less treated) – and let macerate around 72 hours if you poured cold water or 24 hours if you poured boiling water.
• After 24 or 72 hours, filter and only keep the liquid (put the leaves in the compost)

How to use rhubarb manure as an insecticide

Spray the manure undiluted on the plants that need to be treated against black aphids or the leek moth. You can use the rhubarb manure on rose bushes, fruit trees, bushes, flower plants and other perennials and garden plants. All of those being the privileged field for aphids. It can also be used on leeks contaminated by the moth.

How to use rhubarb manure as a pesticide?

You will use the manure diluted – 1 volume of manure for 5 volumes of water – to prevent or to fight against the invasion of slugs. You pour it around the contaminated plants (or which could be contaminated)

How to keep rhubarb manure

You can keep the manure for several months. For that, you need to store it in plastic or glass containers, away from heat and light.

Psst n°1: if you don’t want to make manure or if you have a lot of leaves, you can put them directly on the ground, around the bushes to prevent the growth of weeds for example.

Psst n°2: rhubarb leaves may be useful in the kitchen. Apparently, if you cook them for a few minutes in a pot whose bottom is burnt, it will detach everything.