Set out the plants in rows where the soil has been fertilized, is deep and in good tilth. The best strains of rhubarb will not produce good stalks if the land be hard or the subsoil high and hard. The rows should be four feet apart to allow of horse tillage. The plants may be from three to four feet apart in the row. During the growing season they require the same sort of surface tillage that you would give to corn or potatoes. If you are making the most of your rhubarb bed, you will give it quite a heavy coat of manure in the fall, to act as mulch to keep the soil from freezing too deep, and also to preserve its texture. During the storms of winter, the manure leaches away somewhat and fertilizes the roots, so that they are prepared to make an early growth in the spring. The season for selling is short, as early in the summer the demand for rhubarb gives place to strawberries and other small fruits. It is the grower who has it early in the market who reaps profit from rhubarb. By means of the New Rhubarb Culture, rhubarb may now be forced for market out of season, and then it brings the best prices of all. Roots are left in the garden until they have been frozen and are then transplanted to specially prepared beds and forced for the Christmas trade. These beds may be in the open field if one has a system of heating by steam forced through trenches, or they may be in specially constructed forcing houses; or, simplest of all, they may be in the house cellar, even though the floor be of concrete. Rhubarb requires but little moisture and when it is being forced, it need not go deep to find its food, if the soil it has is rich enough. Three inches of earth will give it all the hold it needs, and if the light is completely excluded, the growth will all go to stalk. If you have a cellar bed, screen it off from the rest of the cellar so that no light can reach it; a small kerosene-oil lamp with a chimney that has been thoroughly smoke-blackened, will give all the heat necessary to start growth. The stalks begin to shoot up looking for light and will do almost nothing in the way of leaf-growth because of its lack. In this way the whole energy of the plant is diverted into profit-making stalks.[9] The roots that have been forced for the Christmas market cannot be used again the following season. They need a season’s rest. (Read J. E. Morse’s “New Rhubarb Culture.”) But this absence of leaf, which is so desirable in forced rhubarb, would be injurious to the garden rhubarb. In out-of-door growth, the vigor and fruitfulness of the plants in any growing season, are largely determined by the spread of leaves in the preceding season. For this reason, after the cutting season is over, the plants are encouraged to develop leaves; the smaller and weaker ones being cut off that the large ones may grow still larger, but all seed stalks should be cut, so as to preserve the vigor for next season’s growth of stalks.