Tag: chard

  • Rain is for Chard

    ChardPatch

    The Swiss Chard thrives in the cool, fall drizzle. It’s one of those productive vegetables, which keeps sending up luscious leaves, no matter how many times you cut it. A ten foot row of Swiss Chard will feed a family all season.

    A few days ago, I read a Washington Post article titled Why quirky Portland is winning the battle for young college grads. The article starts with these paragraphs:

    Of all the Very Portland things that exist in Portland, there is a plot of land next to City Hall, right outside the building’s front portico, where the city is growing its own Swiss chard.
    “And on a place that used to be a parking lot!” exclaims Mayor Charlie Hales, adding a detail that actually makes this story even more Portland.

    Sounds very sane to me. It’s actually sad that it’s considered quirky for a city to grow chard next to city hall. Chard is such a beautiful vegetable, and so easy to grow, so productive, that it would be insane for cities not to grow it on city land. Someday, reporters will visit a city, whose city hall isn’t surrounded by vegetable gardens, and wonder what is wrong with that city.

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  • Off to Market Today

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    Off to market today are ruby streaks, chard, arugula, cherry tomatoes, baby kale and magenta spreen. Few things are as rewarding as growing produce.

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  • Out of the Garden Today – August 1, 2014

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    Growing your own food enables you to appreciate the fact that eating food is eating growing things. The vegetables I grow vary from year to year. A few years back, we were eating pea pods all summer long. This year, chard is a mainstay. The great thing about chard is that a single plant will provide many meals. Let the leaves get to a good size, cut the whole plant down to about an inch or two above the ground, and in a week or two, it will produce another handful of leaves for another meal. You can do this for several months.

    Chard, rhubarb, onions, and leaks. Those are tonight’s vegetables. Steam a mountain of chard and serve it with rhubarb sauce on the side. There’s a combination that will have you begging for more. Your chances of finding chard and rhubarb sauce in a restaurant? Next to nil I think.

    Here are some references I found regrading chard and rhubarb:

    First up were the chard rolls. This was the vegetarian option for the evening and was a wonderful surprise. The chard rolls are filled with brown rice and sweet potato and are served over sorrel sauce with a side of asparagus… Prairie Plate: A Sustainable Restaurant by Sara Sawatzki


    Hacking the leaves from a bunch of thick-stalked summer rhubarb last night, it struck me as a terrible waste that those leaves are so poisonous. It seems wrong to put something so lush and healthy on the compost. Indeed, some old-school gardeners won’t even do that, and a few allotments ban them too, even though there is no proof the leaves do any harm once rotted down. Thank goodness for the green and ruby stalks though, with their knife-sharp edge to cut through the sweetness of pastry or crumble… Nigel’s chard and rhubarb recipes


    This is a recipe designed for “chefs” like me, who choose their recipes on titles alone, not bothering to look at the ingredient list until the last minute. For those who are more inclined to think ahead, to peruse the component ingredients, thinking about how the flavors work together, you might be a bit stymied, if not downright turned off… Tofu With Hot And Sour Rhubarb Sauce


    The earth goddess was exercising her sense of humor when she came up with rhubarb–not a fruit, not exactly a vegetable, poisonous leaves, medicinal roots. “Let’s see if they figure this one out,” she was chuckling to herself. I suspect rhubarb’s reputation as something old-fashioned, sour and stringy is because of its rather unappetizing name. (It comes from “rha of the barbarians”, which refers to its origins in Siberia near the river Rha, now the Volga).… A Cook’s Guide: Rhubarb Rehab


    Due to some bad labeling from our stock photo supplier, our page design team mistakenly placed a picture of Swiss chard on the page, and the error was not caught before the newspaper went to press … Is it Swiss chard or rhubarb