Eat your Landscaping!

That’s right, you’ll have beautiful flowerbeds, be doing your immediate environment a big favor, have much better vegetables and you and your family will be a little healthier.

Better yet, your yard will look fabulous. One of the most neglected, most beautiful and delicious vegetables you can grow is Ruby Swiss Chard. Kids even love it---if it’s fresh. It’s loaded with vitamins A, B’s, C, E, and a wide variety of minerals, including calcium and magnesium—if it’s fresh.

Closely related to beets, it’s impervious to insects. You’ll never even be tempted to use a pest control of any kind. It’s a gorgeous growing plant that just keeps on giving. I recently took out 3 plants that I’d planted 15 months ago. It was still producing, and had been throughout the entire 15 months. I only took it out because I wanted to plant something else in that spot.

To have a quick and delicious vegetable in less time than it takes to drive through a fast food place, just take a pair of scissors out to your flower bed, cut off the outer stalks of the Chard at the base of the plant, rinse, and start cooking! You can do that year round in our climate, but if you can only grow it for a few months, it’s well worth it. Every few days in warmer weather, you’ll have a whole new batch of outer leaves to harvest.

Be sure you get "Ruby Swiss Chard." What you'll normally find already started in the nurseries is called, "City Lights Swiss Chard," or "Bright Lights Swiss Chard." Whatever the boys in the laboratories crossed Ruby Swiss Chard with to make the hybrid, yet very colorful "Bright Lights Swiss Chard," has taken away the natural insect repelling substance in Ruby Swiss Chard. When cooked, if you manage to get rid of the aphid infestations, it looks just the same. The problem is that the "Bright Lights" hybrid is an aphid magnet. If you can’t find the started plants, it’s very easy to grow from seed.
To Cook:
* Heat some extra virgin olive oil and garlic in a large pot or frying pan, chop up the stalks into bite sized pieces.
* Roll the leaves all together and cut them into about 2 inch wide strips.
* Put the stalks in the pan with the heated olive oil and garlic.
* With the burner on medium heat, cover, and when the stalks are almost soft, add the leaves, toss with the olive oil, garlic and the almost done stalks, and cover the pot or pan.
* Check them after 5-7 minutes, and if not quite done, which is about the color and texture of cooked spinach, give them another stir, cover and give them a few more minutes. We like to add a bit of organic cider vinegar, but that’s just a matter of taste. The vinegar also helps release the calcium in green vegetables.