Plant · P-254

Swiss Chard

Beta vulgaris subsp. vulgaris

Swiss chard is the one leafy green here that survives a genuinely hot summer bed rather than bolting through it - it does not run to seed under long hot days the way beet or spinach does, so with afternoon shade and steady water it lives through a hundred-degree July, though growth stalls and the real yield comes in spring and fall. It gives three harvests off one planting: the leaf blade cooks like spinach, the steamed petiole is a gourmet vegetable in its own right, and the second-year flowering stem works as a broccoli substitute. Cut-and-come-again harvesting from the outer leaves keeps a single plant producing for months, which makes it a bed plant rather than a field crop. Its leaves also make solid cattle and sheep forage wilted or ensiled, but never raw to pigs, since the oxalic acid in beet-family greens is dangerous to swine.