How to grow chard

Chard is beet. The same species, bred in a different direction — for leaves and stems rather than for a swollen root — which is why the seed looks identical to beetroot seed and why the two cross freely.

What makes it worth a row is the length of the harvest. Spinach gives you a few weeks in spring and then bolts. Lettuce gives you summer and then freezes. Chard sown in spring picks from early summer, stands the heat that flattens spinach, stands the frost that ends lettuce, keeps going through a mild winter, and puts on a final flush the following spring before it finally runs to seed.

That is eight or nine months from one sowing, which nothing else in these guides matches. It is the reason the crop is worth growing even if you consider it a slightly dull vegetable.

It is also two vegetables in one plant. The midribs — white, yellow, pink or red depending on variety — are a distinct thing from the leaf, closer to asparagus or celery in texture, and worth cooking separately rather than throwing away.

Each chard seed is not a seed. It is a dried fruit containing two or three seeds, exactly as beetroot is, which is why a row comes up in tufts and why thinning is not optional.

Sow about three quarters of an inch deep, two or three inches apart, in rows eighteen inches apart, then thin the tufts to a single seedling and finally to about ten inches between plants. It looks like a lot of room for a seedling and the plants get big.

It transplants well, unlike most of its relatives, so starting in modules is a reasonable option — sow two or three clusters per cell, thin to one plant, and set out. That also gets around slugs taking the seedlings, which is the main early risk in a wet spring.

Sow from about two weeks before your last frost. A second sowing in midsummer gives you younger, more tender plants to carry through winter, which is worth doing if you have the space — the spring-sown plants get large and coarse by autumn.

Soaking the seed overnight speeds germination noticeably. The fruit is corky and takes a while to wet through.

This is what makes the crop last, and it is where most people underuse it.

Take the outer leaves and leave the growing point in the centre untouched. The plant keeps producing from the middle indefinitely. Snap or cut each stem right at the base rather than tearing it part-way, because a stub left behind rots and lets disease into the crown.

Pick more than you think. A chard plant that is being harvested hard makes tender new leaves continuously; one that is picked lightly puts its energy into a few enormous coarse leaves that nobody wants to eat. If your chard has gone tough, the answer is usually to pick it harder rather than to feed it.

Take no more than a third to a half of a plant at once, and rotate around the row.

Through winter the plants slow almost to a stop — that is normal, and they are holding rather than growing. Keep taking a little, and they resume properly in spring.

Chard is hardier than it looks, and in a maritime winter it usually stands without protection. Hard frost will knock the leaves down, but the crown normally survives and pushes new growth when the weather turns.

A cloche or a layer of fleece over the row makes the difference between picking occasionally and picking properly through the cold months. So does taking off the tattiest lower leaves in late autumn, so nothing wet is lying against the crown.

The end comes in spring. Chard is biennial, so a plant that has been through a winter will run to seed as the days lengthen — a thick flower stem, smaller and tougher leaves, and a bitter edge. Take the last decent picking when you see the stem starting, and pull the plants.

That spring flush before bolting is genuinely useful, though. It arrives in what British gardeners call the hungry gap, when the winter crops are finishing and nothing sown in spring is ready yet, and very little else fills it.

Beet leaf miner is the one real pest, and it is the same insect that troubles beetroot and spinach, for the obvious reason that all three are close relatives. The larvae feed inside the leaf, making pale winding tunnels that become translucent blistered patches. On a leaf crop, that is the crop.

The controls are the same as for spinach: floating row cover from sowing, rotation away from where beet, chard or spinach grew last year, and picking off and destroying tunnelled leaves as soon as you see them so the larvae never complete their cycle in your bed.

Because chard is picked continuously rather than harvested once, removing affected leaves is easy and effective here in a way it is not on a one-shot crop.

Slugs take seedlings, and downy mildew can show in a wet winter as pale patches with grey growth beneath — space the plants so air moves and take off affected leaves.

Otherwise this crop is remarkably free of trouble, which along with the harvest length is most of the argument for growing it.