Meet our rhubarb grower

When you plant a Digger's rhubarb crown, you are planting a piece of rhubarb history. Grown in Victoria by the son of ‘Rex the Rhubarb King’, legendary market gardener, rhubarb expert and wartime supplier of rhubarb to the armed forces, this generational passion is evident in the varieties we have to offer, and so good was Rex’s rhubarb that it was ordered by the hundreds in sacks full for the troops. Rex was even given a brand new five tonne army truck to help with transporting this precious crop - on the condition he paint over the khaki so no one would know where it came from.

Colin, Rex’s son, helped his dad through these years with all the hard work expected of a farmers child. Precious fowl manure (which was in short supply at the time) was procured only by mucking out commercial chicken farming sheds, which Colin and his Dad did on the way back from the old Queen Victoria Market after selling their plants and stems. Colin remembers building forts with the sacks of manure on the back of the truck and riding home tucked inside these less than safe structures!

Urban creep saw the sale of the farm, and the path of his own distinguished horticultural career meant Colin abandoned rhubarb and didn’t grow another stick for almost 50 years. Unexpectedly, a love for them returned with such force when he found three sickly plants on the retirement property he shares with his wife Tina. It quickly reignited that family passion and became a generational obsession. The knowledge imparted to him throughout his upbringing had not left him, but unfortunately the plants grown over generations in Victoria, bred to thrive in our climate of milder winters had been lost, and those he found on his property never thrived. And so he and Tina travelled the globe seeking out the best varieties for Australian gardens, and in doing so Colin returned to his market garden roots, unintentionally to take the ‘crown’ (pun intended) of Rhubarb King in his own right. These varieties have now been grown on his farm for over several decades and a new legacy has begun.