Beautiful Swiss chard is a delicious vegetable that can be grown very easily, you can grow it in the garden or in pots and containers.
Swiss chard comes in white or rainbow colours. Personally I love growing rainbow swiss chard it comes in vivid colours and brightens the vegetable garden.
You can start sowing swiss chard in pots on your window sill or straight into the garden. I prefer sowing in pots, I fill the pot with good quality compost, water the compost and sow the seeds by scattering thinly, alternatively, you can place around 6 seeds in a pot, but it really depends how many plants you want to grow.
Once the seeds are up let them grow to around 2” and then transplant them, replant the strongest looking plants. If you are growing swiss chard in pots or containers, then fill these up with compost or a mixture of compost and top soil. Swiss chard like free-draining soil and prefers full sun. In a large pot of around 12”, you can plant 2 to 3 Swiss chard seedling plants. Swiss chard is a large plant.
If you are growing in the garden then you can sow directly into the soil, sow the seeds about ½ in deep and place the seeds around 2 to 3” apart and sow 2 or 3 seeds at each spot. Once the seedlings are up, you will need to thin them out, pull out the weaker seedlings, you can replant them somewhere else or pass them on to a friend who may want to grow some plants. If you want to grow rows of swiss chard then they should be at least 12”apart.
Be sure to water swiss chard on a regular basis, and to retain moisture you can mulch around the plant and this helps retain moisture in the soil, we use grass cuttings from our lawn, but we use no pesticides or weedkiller.
Swiss chard is an easy to grow vegetable which doesn’t seem to have any pests or diseases and it’s a biennial. You can give Swiss chard a boost with liquid fertilizer and it will appreciate that.
You can start picking swiss chard even when the leaves are small, you can also leave it until you have a large leaf and a beautiful coloured stalk. Swiss chard is one of those plants that the more you pick the more it will produce.
Swiss chard can be cooked just like spinach, I love putting a knob of butter, letting it melt, and adding the swiss chard to the pan, then add salt and pepper and add a dash of water and add the lid to the saucepan, let it cook until it’s all wilted, around 5 to 10 minutes… delicious.
