Transplanting
A scarred leaf from my rhubarb plant
I'm a gardener. I have a big organic edible garden where I grow everything. Often the plants flourish. August and September produces a rainbow tsunami of sun ripened heirloom tomatoes. I compost; I start plants from seeds. It's a life cycle. I fight battles every day with unsightly creatures and their gross offspring. Examined with a magnifying glass, it's unnerving that they're real, not a Michael Bay fiction. I remove and smash infiltrators with my fingers, or eradicate infestations with natural sprays, eyeball leaves for diseases. I feel like a soldier. I pull volunteers and the unworthy to give my plants unadulterated access to water, nutrients, light. I protect my plants, and I eat them.
The storylines haunt me; creepy emerging colonies are taken down, I have grand victories, failures; they can all consume me. Gardening is an effective antidote to human drama; like Calgon promised me as a kid, it takes me away.
The struggles are hard to witness; it hurts to observe, especially after tremendous effort. I feel responsible. Sometimes the more I try, the more the plant seems to suffer. And yet stopping feels unethical. It's my responsibility. This weekend, I turned to my trusted ChatGPT for advice about my sickly rhubarb plant that I've been trying to establish for years. Like the best subplots, the inquiry turned into more than a sum of its parts. Here is a piece of our dialogue:
Your rhubarb doesn't look doomed, but it does look stressed.
From the photo I see:
Yellowing around the leaf margins
Brown, dead tissue along the edges
Numerous dark spots with yellow halos
Some holes where dead tissue has dropped out ("shot-hole" appearance)
This is most consistent with a fungal or bacterial leaf spot disease, combined with some environmental stress (wet weather, nutrient stress, or transplant shock).
A few things to check:
Remove the worst leaves — cut off the most affected leaves at the base and dispose of them (don't compost if they're heavily diseased).
Water the soil, not the leaves — if you're watering overhead, switch to ground level. Leaf spot diseases thrive on wet foliage.
Mulch and feed — rhubarb is a heavy feeder. A top-dressing of compost or aged manure can help. If you haven't fed it recently, a balanced organic fertilizer is reasonable.
Don't harvest heavily — if the plant is struggling, let it keep most of its stalks and leaves this season so it can rebuild energy.
A few questions:
Is this a newly planted rhubarb or an established crown?
Roughly how many years old is it?
Are all the leaves affected, or just the older outer leaves?
If you can take one wider photo showing the entire plant and surrounding bed, I can tell you whether this looks like a minor disease issue or something more systemic.
Cara: It’s been around for some years; it was healthier a couple years ago but never thrived. Does wildlife like rhubarb? I’m thinking it would be happier someplace else. My strawberries also look miserable. Gardening is hard - am I trying too hard? Or not hard enough?
I suspect your instincts are right: the rhubarb may simply be telling you it doesn’t like where it lives.
Rhubarb is one of those plants that should be almost embarrassingly vigorous in the Hudson Valley. When it spends years merely surviving, I start looking at site conditions rather than plant care.
A few possibilities:
Too much competition from tree roots, shrubs, or aggressive perennials.
Not enough sun. Rhubarb will tolerate part shade, but really wants 6+ hours of direct sun.
Poor soil fertility. It is a remarkably hungry plant.
Poor drainage or periodic waterlogging.
Crown planted too deep or gradually buried by mulch and soil.
As for wildlife: surprisingly, most deer, rabbits, and woodchucks leave rhubarb alone. The leaves contain high levels of oxalic acid and are generally not preferred browse. So if it has been chewed, I’d suspect insects more than mammals.
Your comment about strawberries is interesting because strawberries and rhubarb often fail for opposite reasons:
Rhubarb likes rich, deep soil and consistent moisture.
Strawberries like good drainage and don’t enjoy being crowded or shaded.
If both are struggling, I’d wonder about the site itself—perhaps too much shade, root competition, or depleted soil.
And gardening really is a constant dance between:
trying too hard,
not trying hard enough,
and working on the wrong thing entirely.
I’ve gradually come to think that many experienced gardeners spend less energy “fixing” plants and more energy relocating them to where they want to live.
A healthy rhubarb crown can be divided and moved in early spring or fall. If you have a sunnier spot with deep soil and less competition, moving it may accomplish more than years of fertilizing and fussing.
Can you remind me where this rhubarb is planted relative to the house, studio, woods, or large trees? A wider photo of the bed might tell the story faster than the leaves themselves.
Cara: It’s inside my edible garden which is all raised beds and protected by a high fence that also goes 18” deep to prevent burrowing.
That changes my diagnosis quite a bit.
If the rhubarb is in a protected raised-bed edible garden, then deer, woodchucks, root competition, and most of the usual landscape culprits move way down the list.
What I see in the photo starts to look more like:
Leaf spot disease (still my leading suspect)
Nutrient depletion in the bed
Water stress (too wet or too dry at times)
An aging crown that has never been divided
A few questions:
How old is the rhubarb crown? Five years? Ten?
Do you regularly add compost to the raised beds?
Have the strawberries been in the same beds for several years?
The strawberries are the clue that interests me most. Strawberries often become less productive after 3–4 years and can accumulate disease problems. If both crops have been sitting in the same soil for years, the issue may be less about individual plants and more about the condition of the bed.
One thing I’ve noticed from your garden photos over the past few months: your property is lush and vigorous overall. You’re clearly not someone who neglects plants. When a specific bed consistently underperforms while the rest of the landscape thrives, I start suspecting a site-specific issue rather than a gardening-skill issue.
And on your broader question:
Gardening is hard - are you trying too hard? Or not hard enough?
Often neither.
The trickiest lesson is learning which plants deserve intervention and which are giving you useful information. Sometimes a struggling plant is essentially saying:
“I’ve spent three years demonstrating that I don’t like this spot.”
Experienced gardeners often look like they’re working less because they’ve learned when to stop fighting a plant and either:
improve the soil,
move the plant,
divide and rejuvenate it,
or replace it with something that actually wants to be there.
The rhubarb isn’t on death’s door. If this were mine, I’d cut off the worst leaves, top-dress heavily with compost, and watch it through this season. If it still looks mediocre by fall, I’d divide and move it rather than spending another year trying to persuade it.
Cara: That sounds right. This season I’ve been doing a lot of transplanting. I feel like I’m struggling too. Trying to find my groove but pivots turning into endless pirouettes. I feel stuck in my head, like I’m trying too hard or not trying hard enough.
The rhubarb may be a better metaphor than you intended.
A couple of years ago it was healthier. It hasn’t died. It hasn’t really thrived. You’ve been trying to help it. This year you’re transplanting things and reassessing where they belong.
That sounds familiar.
What strikes me about your situation isn’t that you’re failing to find your groove. It’s that you’ve spent the last year doing an enormous amount of soil preparation while simultaneously expecting visible growth.
In roughly the same period you’ve:
rebuilt a business identity after years of project-based work,
launched and sustained your writing,
joined the Hudson Preservation Commission,
pursued licensure again,
expanded your network,
explored new AI and design workflows,
developed (000),
repositioned yourself toward cultural and strategic work,
maintained a historic property and studio.
That’s a lot of root growth.
The hard part is that root growth looks an awful lot like standing still from above ground.
The phrase that caught me was:
pivots turning into endless pirouettes
A pivot has a destination. A pirouette returns to where it started.
When I look at your recent months, I don’t actually see endless spinning. I see convergence. The conversations with museum people, cultural organizations, preservation work, community leadership, workplace transformation, design strategy—they’re all orbiting a surprisingly consistent center: you’re trying to work at the intersection of design, culture, people, and systems.
The frustration may be less that you’re spinning and more that the market hasn’t yet reflected back the role you’ve already started inhabiting.
Gardening has a similar trap. When a bed underperforms, it’s tempting to keep tweaking fertilizer, watering, spacing, mulch—because those are actions. Sometimes the better question is:
“Is this the right plant in the right place?”
Not because the plant is wrong, but because the environment isn’t supporting what it’s capable of becoming.
I don’t think you’re trying too hard.
I also don’t think you’re not trying hard enough.
I think you may be at the uncomfortable stage where effort is no longer the limiting factor.
The challenge becomes choosing what not to tend.
A gardener can spend an entire season nursing a mediocre rhubarb. Or divide it, move it, and discover it wanted a different corner all along.
You don’t need another pirouette.
You may need a few deliberate plantings and then enough patience to see which ones take hold.
And for what it’s worth, every time you describe the work that energizes you—museums, exhibitions, cultural strategy, communities, design as a catalyst for transformation—the voice sounds different. Less effortful. More like a plant growing toward light than one being staked upright.
That’s usually worth paying attention to.