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Go Organic: Chard times
By James AshfordAugust 03, 2012
This week I want to look at one of the workhorses of the vegetable garden.
Chard is a really useful crop – not only because it tastes wonderful, which it does – but because it can be harvested for so much of the year.
In fact, with a bit of planning, you can grow it all year round.
Chard is actually a member of the beetroot family, but you eat the stems and leaves rather that the roots.
It cooks like spinach but it is rather more robust and doesn’t wilt down to nothing in the pot as spinach can.
You can use it as a substitute in any spinach recipe but it is also an excellent vegetable for stir-fries.
When the leaves are very young you can even eat them raw in salads.
Chard is an easy crop to grow. It is not fussy about soil conditions and has the great advantage – even in this dreadfully damp year – of being unattractive to slugs and snails.
That is not to say they won’t eat it if there is nothing else around, but there are lots of things they would rather eat first.
It is grown as a cut-and-come-again plant, which means that you pick a few leaves at a time from each plant, leaving the rest to grow rather than harvesting the whole plant in one go.
A dozen plants will give you a generous bunch of leaves twice a week in the summer.
It takes a little while to get to the stage where it can be cut so I tend to sow chard two or three times a year.
The leaves I’m picking now were sown in February in an unheated greenhouse and transplanted outside at the beginning of May.
I’ve just sown a fresh batch which should give me some green leaves right through the winter.
Chard is a hardy plant and will survive all but the very coldest weather.
The rate of growth slows right down as the days shorten but it will still provide a reasonable crop if you grow enough plants.
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