Glittertrash's Swiss Chard 'Bright Lights'
Beta vulgaris var. cicla

I pulled up all 15 (I had never counted them before- wow!) of my chard/silverbeet plants today, and replanted them into the new raised bed. I need the bed that they were in for more sun-hungry plants now, and the chard has been wilting & suffering in the all-day sunlight.

My mountain of chard plants was quite a sight to behold, and I wound up harvesting a huge pile of leaves off them to try to improve their chances of coping with transplantation. The harvest was immense- a forest so large you could lose a small elephant in there. Photo taken with my boot next to the leaf-mountain for scale.

I don’t know how well they will cope with transplanting at this size/maturity (I transplanted my potted chard though when I first moved in here and it bounced back just fine). I’m prepared to lose some or all of the plants, even though they are the best producers in my garden at the moment- I have plenty of seeds & they’re quick to grow, if I need more.

Half the leaves & stems were used in a chard-fest for dinner tonight (chard, lentil & rice pastries, and a chard, tofu and broccoli bake). There’s still heaps to go, so chard-fest continues tomorrow night. I might make a veggie lasagne.

Harvested a big handful of leaves my various chard plants, which are all doing so well at the moment. I have two plants that came up in this amazing hot pink, and they make me so very, very happy. The colour in the sunshine is so beautiful. This is definitely a plant with serious ornamental value.

Unfortunately all the chard has to be transplanted soon, since this is the bed that gets the most all-day sun and therefor gets tomato-priority. Chard certainly does NOT need all-day sun in this climate- it was wilting in the heat today, and it was only 24C. It’ll be getting a lot warmer later in the year. Hopefully it’ll bounce back from transplanting fairly well.

I’ve been wondering what’s been munching on the leaves off my silverbeet and broad beans, and I found this little guy. I think he & possibly some of his friends are to blame. So I mixed up my first batch of Dipel and sprayed it all over the plants in that bed. I think I’ll have to get a better spray bottle though as the Dipel seemed to clog it up really fast, which made it hard work to get through the whole bottle.

I popped some extra seeds in around the gaps left by the cat scratching up all my original neat lines.

The seedlings are doing reasonably well but the seed rows have been scratched & scattered by one of the feline housemates apparently mistaking my new vegie garden for a deluxe kitty-litter tray. The silverbeet & kale & broccoli raab all seem mixed up together, and are emerging in scattered clumps rather than neat rows. I’ve thinned out the clumps to one seedling per spot and will do a repeat sowing of new seed into the bigger gaps over the weekend.

The stems of even the tiniest of these are pretty bright (red it looks like at the moment).