Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Mostly chard

For the DeKalb County Times
by Karley

The roadsides and hillsides are abuzz with spring. The dogwoods have spent their blooms and are leafing out, and the landscape looks like a watercolor right now with its splashes of exuberant greens. But that doesn't mean we should put away our sweaters just yet. Who knows what April will bring? Spring in Middle Tennessee is not to be trusted!

Keep your eye out for those patches of watercress. It's growing like mad right now. I harvested two pounds, and two days later I couldn't tell where I had cut it. There's actually a huge patch on the side of the road off highway 70 West just as you come into Liberty. There must be a spring near the sidewalk because the sidewalk is covered in watercress. Free gourmet food!

Between gardening friends I've spoken with and our own garden, right now you can have cabbage, beets, chard, broccoli, turnips, mustards, green onions, Asian greens, potatoes, lettuce, kale, arugula, and peas in the ground. Our greenhouse is filled with tiny tomato babies and lettuce starts. We'll start our eggplants and peppers today or tomorrow. There's no sense rushing those seedlings; last year we started them earlier and they just sulked until the heat really got cranking.

Eggplants can be challenging to grow in our area. In our garden and our immediate neighbors' gardens the flea beetles just demolish the plants as soon as they're set out. I've heard other growers say the potato beetles chewed up their eggplants. It takes skill and luck, probably in equal measure, to grow great eggplants here. So when you encounter locally grown eggplants at the farmers' market, you should be sure to load up and thank your farmer!

As challenging and persnickety as eggplants may be, chard is exactly the opposite. Chard is closely related to beets which is why the leaves look exactly like beet tops. As an aside—you do eat your beet greens, don't you?


Chard comes in many varieties, some with white ribs, others with florescent pink or yellow, and a few with streaked ribs. The greens are usually green, but a few varieties have reddish tinted leaves. The only kind I grow is Bright Lights chard because the rib colors come in a wild array of bright colors, and some of the plants have red leaves.

Chard leaves are succulent and tender. Grasp the stem at the cut end with one hand and with the other hand, run your fingers down the length of the leaf. This lets you pull all the greens off the rib. If you're going to make a sauté, just rough chop the greens, throw in some heated oil for only about two minutes, and dress up with garlic, soy sauce, ginger, pepper, butter, coconut oil, or anything else that sounds good. Be sure you remove the chard from the heat when it's still bright green. Don't pour off any liquid since many minerals and vitamins are in the juices that are released during cooking.

When the chard is really cranking the leaves can get huge—up to several inches across. If you cut the ribs off of the larger leaves, you can use each leaf as a wrap for chicken, egg, or tuna salad. Chop up the ribs and throw them in your salad of choice. The brightly colored ribs taste very similar to the leaves. When finely chopped the ribs make an absolutely delightful culinary confetti. You can turn your humdrum deviled eggs and green salads into tasty explosions of art.

As if its stunning beauty and culinary strengths aren't enough to convince you to grow chard, the ease with which you can have it pouring out of your garden should make it irresistible. The seeds are actually little fruits which contain up to half a dozen little seeds. Some people recommend soaking or scoring the seeds for faster germination, but it's not necessary. Throw the seeds in your dirt then when they're a couple inches tall, thin the seedlings so that you have a few inches between each plant. Be absolutely sure to eat the thinnings—because they're great.

Chard appreciates soil amended with organic matter, like the compost you make from your kitchen waste and backyard leaves, but it can make its living in leaner soil, too. At our farm we really haven't had any pest problems to speak of, except the blister beetles that got a little out of hand at the end of the summer last year. At that point our chickens were eating a lot of chard and beetle salads.

Chard will grow in full sun but will tolerate a little shade. It tolerates heat after the turnip greens have gone tough and bitter and is drought resistant, so if you leave your spring planting in place through the summer you can harvest from it again in the fall. Chard is a “cut and come again” crop, so don't take more than around a third of the leaves during any single harvest, being sure to leave the newest inner growth, and in a couple days you can come back and harvest more.

Chard takes light frost like a champ, so you can eat off one planting all season long. If you make some simple hoops and cover the chard with fabric or plastic, you can have fresh greens in your garden until the low temperature gets into the low 20s in the winter. If there's another winter like this year, you wouldn't have anything to worry about!

Chard also grow enthusiastically in containers, so don't feel limited by space. Even a six inch pot can hold enough chard to keep one eater supplied throughout the growing season.

Even if you've never grown chard before, make 2012 the last year you don't have chard in your garden!

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