Pic of it now looks worse in person. Last year the leaves were 3 times as big and gorgeous.

That does look a bit unhappy, but I'm afraid I probably won't be of any help. My usual procedure is to clean out the chicken pen in the fall, put the manure on the rhubarb. When I start cutting rhubarb in the spring I cut off the leaves and use them as mulch under the plant. Mine are about waist high, but I'm only five feet tall, so that might not be all that impressive.

Mine looked good this year until we stopped getting any rain at all, now it's all going to seed but it does look happier than yours. Have you been harvesting some, or just leaving the plant to flower?

Annie

I harvested some but not a lot. I feel like it was because I trimmed the flowers but that is wild guess. It seemed to start looking bad at that time - but that was also early in the year.

I doubt I harvested more then 15% of leaf stems and only for a couple weeks.

I don't think it's from cutting the flowers, I do that to mine regularly and it doesn't seem to affect it at all. I think the first thing I would do is to give it some fertilizer of some type, although it's a bad time of year to start new growth. Mine gets the twice annual dose of compost from the chicken coop which is a mix of wood shavings, chicken droppings, straw, layer crumbles that have been scratched in, etc. I think straight fresh manure would probably be too "hot". When I first planted it I didn't do that and it struggled, so maybe it's just hungry (I hope).

Annie