Chard

The prize for best-looking vegetable in our veg patch this year so far goes to the chard (it's often known as Swiss Chard). As you can see, it's the ruby variety, with a rather attractive contrast between the bright red stalks and the lush green leaves. A bit like mini rhubarb. We've got a couple of globe artichokes there as well, which may look spectacular later in the year.

Mind you, although the artichoke may look more dramatic later on, I don't think it combines being edible with being good-looking quite so efficiently as the chard. After all, you can eat all the bits of the chard which appear above ground. Your artichoke, though, is a different beast entirely, consisting of tiny gobbet of squishy edible stuff, surrounded by a massive gothic edifice of spiky inedibility.

So, the chard, with it's balanced scorecard, is still out on top IMHO. But then, I'm no expert - please don't be mislead into thinking that I'm some sort of chard guru, with an almost mystical attunement to the Way of Chard, attained after years of hard study self-sacrifice and meditation. I've eaten the stuff about two or three times, am growing it for the first time and can make no claim to an easy familiarity with things chard-releated.

In fact, I'm not even quite sure about the best way to eat it. I don't think I'm going to be on the phone to my mate Gordon Ramsay for recipe ideas any time soon (not after my last post, anyway), but there is, unsurprisingly, lots of stuff about chard on the internet. Treat the leaves as you would spinach, it says here, either cooked or raw in salads. The stalks are, apparently, rather good sautee'd with garlic.

I also learn that "Swiss" chard is no more Swiss than the cuckoo clock. It's a cultivated descendant of sea beet, native to the Mediterranean area and the "Swiss" name is thought to derive from a Swiss botanist called Koch, who gave the plant its scientific name (beta vulgaris) in the 1800s. I've not checked these facts exhaustively*, but have no reason to believe that they are deliberately misleading parts of an elaborate international conspiracy to hide the real Truth about chard (I'm pretty sure that the black helicopter buzzing around earlier was only the cops checking out the traffic on the M1).

Anyway, there will be time enough to admire our chard before harvest time comes around. Unless, of course, it get nobbled by slugs, before it's time comes. The horror!

* after a few minutes of searching, the only botanist called Koch I could find was German, but sometimes even I give up and think life's too short to look everything up...