Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Pretty good start for Chard







Who knows what Chard is? Well, I'll tell you then. It's a leafy plant in the lettuce family. It is more closely related to beets though. It is simply a bunch of leaves growing from a base of roots. Then you hack them off and eat them when they are about as big as the picture on the right.
They go great chopped up in a salad, or if you want you can stir fry it with bacon! yummy!
 Now dumb Me I did not get a close up of what chard looks like before you cut it. Only the single leaf up above. But each individual stem you see there was a full fledged chard leaf.
This is another view of what it looks like when you harvest it. The nice thing about chard is that you can cut it back and within about 1 week it will be ready to harvest again. The first harvest takes about 3 weeks to get going, but once it has a root system in place it just goes like mad!






 The harvest from this was a 18 Gallon Garbage bag full.  When I picked it up I would say it weighed roughly 15 pounds? Now that is a bunch of chard. The daft part of this was that I only took about 60% of what was growing. The other half will need to be picked soon. Then soon after that the stuff I trimmed back will need more trimming!
 A whole bag of that stuff... no idea what to do with it all... any suggestions?

To end on an even happier note, I found a volunteer Tomato plant. It is a cherry tomato and it is growing in one of the cracks in the cement. HAHA, crazy little buggers. It is not too big yet, but It's getting there!

Here is a point of reference for you folk out there, KunKun . oh, and if you look just below the tomato plant and to the left of my doggy is a snail. gross. LOL.

OK! thanks all for the reads! come back soon and I wont let you down!

9 comments:

  1. Crack tomato. Gotta watch out for that. They can get desperate at times. >.>

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  2. Way to go!! Love the rogue tomato! Try this chard recipe out... http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/swiss_chard/

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  3. 15 pounds of Chard? It looks like you got a good harvest!

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  4. I have always wanted to try Chard. Maybe this summer I will have the guts to eat it!

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  5. Good harvest you got there!

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  6. 15 lbs of chard, huh? You should buy a goat. Then you can have chard and goat's milk salad, yum!!!

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