Sunday, April 5, 2009

Volunteering, Alive and Well


The Swiss as a nation have had little need of an army in recent history, but Swiss (chard) volunteers have been lining up in the potager for duty all winter long. Especially, now in spring, their ranks have swollen to enormous proportions. I'm going to need more chard recipes this year to keep up with the volume. So far there have been many that needed transplanting to better locations, but others have been left on the borders of the raised beds to hopefully shade the roots of the tomatoes I've been planting. Tomatoes love cool roots so I usually mulch them. Oh, if only a soldier could polish his boots to the shine level of the yellow stemmed Swiss chard in the first photo!

Curiously, there is not a single lettuce volunteer this year...maybe their seeds need more heat to germinate. This is, so far, the only year I have not had hundreds of lettuce starts in the garden and I purposely allow them to go to seed, so I can have more the following year. I do have some radicchio.

I've recently been reading about Ligurian cooking and "bietole" is the term they use for a very thin stemmed Swiss chard. This Verde da Taglio or Erbette (the original seed I purchased was called Erbette) just may be that plant. I hope so as I have decided to make a bietole torta and am looking forward to a recipe for this specific plant. I may also plant a very wide stemmed cultivar called Monstruoso to use in a fried chard stem recipe that also sounds appealing to try.

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