Jul
22

How to Grow Green Plants Chard: The day will come when it is more popular than spinach

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Chard has a lot going for it. You can plant it as soon as you can work your garden in the spring, and it will provide tasty, nutritious greens for months. Through cold weather or hot, it won’t get bitter, tough, or strong as long as you keep it harvested.

With wide rows you can get basket after basket of chard to can or freeze for the winter. To me, it’s the perfect green for a wintertime meal. It tastes good, it’s nutritious, and it’s a lot cheaper than store-bought greens.

GardenIn processing chard it doesn’t shrink as much as spinach. I’m sure chard will be grown more than spinach someday.

Chard is the easiest wide row crop to grow. It sprouts quickly, and, after an early thinning, it soon shades out any weeds.

It will also stand several freezes both in the spring and in the fall.

Plant chard in wide rows, scattering the seeds 2 to 3 inches apart. After thinning, the plants should be 3 to 4 inches apart.

Keep your chard cut back. Don’t pick only the large outside leaves. They are the oldest and toughest on the plant. Cut the whole plant back to an inch above the soil. You’ll get tender young leaves mixed in with the older ones. Most importantly, you’ll force the plant to grow again. Another harvest will be a few weeks down the road. If you keep the soil fertilized, you can keep cutting the crop back as long as you want. I know a couple in Eugene, Oregon, who make one planting last 3 years. The weather is mild there and the plants don’t freeze, so it’s just a matter of fertilizing and cutting the chard when it gets a foot tall.

If you enjoy chard, make two plantings, one in early spring and another in middle or late summer. You can plant it in the fall in the South, and it will grow throughout the winter.

Chard comes in different colors. Swiss Chard is green with white stems. Ruby Chard has bright red stems and reddish green leaves. I prefer the Ruby Chard because I like the color it adds to a planting of greens. It also has more of a beety taste, which I prefer. When the stalks get ahead of me and grow large, they are more tender than the large Swiss Chard stalks.

However, letting the stalks of Swiss Chard grow very large has its advantages, too. I can strip the leaves and cook them like spinach. That leaves the large white stems, which are delicious in Chinese wok cooking.

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