Meet the Yorkshire rhubarb growers whose crop is eaten in Miami

The process is long and expensive. It is grown outside for two years and then when the roots are ready they are moved into forcing sheds – pitch-black sheds kept at ambient temperatures.

In the sheds the roots begin to grow sticks of the reddish pink vegetable with yellow leaves – sometimes making popping and creaking noises as they grow.

And then, when ready, they are picked by candlelight to keep the sheds as dark as possible.

Mr Tomlinson says: “We’ve got heaters so we keep it at about 12-13 degrees. It’s all done by manual labour but it’s quite a cosy job. If you’re harvesting, you’re cosy.”

But rhubarb, which is a native plant of Siberia, also needs the colder temperatures.

According to Janet Oldroyd-Hulme, director of E Oldroyd & Sons in Rothwell, a frost is essential for the roots – and is key to the sweeter, more tender sticks that the forcing process creates.

She says: “We measure frost nightly in the soil.

“Once the frost converts the carbohydrate in the root to glucose that root is tricked into growth. They grow from their own energy reserves.

“We provide heated sheds and mist irrigation, so it gets warmer temperatures. The fastest growing varieties can grow up to an inch a day.

“As the sticks are pushing past each other you hear creaking as it grows, a bit like your old bones as you get out of a chair.”

In the early 20th Century there were 200 farms growing rhubarb in the Triangle, but today just nine remain.

The area was ideal for cultivation because it was a situated in a frost pocket and there was cheap coal available from local mines to heat the sheds. Special rhubarb trains ran daily from Ardsley Station until the 1960s, and farmers elsewhere in the country could not compete with Yorkshire’s output.

Mr Tomlinson says while the crop fell out of fashion in the 1980s and 90s its popularity has bounced back in recent years.

“My grandad and my dad in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s had 12 rhubarb sheds. It was a huge operation because there was nothing else in winter so that’s why there were 200 growers.

“In the 1980s and 1990s it went out of fashion and we went down to one shed, but in the last 20 years it’s been growing and building momentum, which is why we’ve built it back up to five sheds now. The last couple of years have been crazy.”

Mrs Oldroyd-Hulme says it was a reaction to overconsumption of rhubarb that caused a backlash in the mid-20th Century.

“So many growers left the industry in the downturn years after the Second World War when people turned away from rhubarb.

“They were sick to the teeth of rhubarb because they had eaten so much during the war. It was exported for the troops too, probably to keep them regular. But people had roots in their garden.”