The nutritional powerhouse hiding in plain sight
Silverbeet (Beta vulgaris var. cicla) is one of the most nutrient-dense leafy greens you can grow. Easy to cultivate, beautiful in the garden, and endlessly versatile in the kitchen.
Right now in the silverbeet year
Late spring
What to do
Once the soil holds above 8 °C, sow directly outdoors or plant out hardened seedlings. Space 30 cm between plants and 40 cm between rows. Water well after transplanting, and use fleece if late frosts still threaten.
Tip
Mature silverbeet handles light frost, but freshly transplanted seedlings rarely survive it. Wait for a safe forecast or use fleece.
The Family
It shares its species with beetroot, sugar beet, and fodder beet. Same plant, bred for different parts.
Packed with Vitamins K, A, and C. Discover exactly what you get per 100g.
Explore nutrition →Seven ways to keep silverbeet usable from August through April: fridge, freezer, ferment, dry, pickle.
Preserve the harvest →How does silverbeet stack up against spinach, kale, and beet greens? Honest answers.
See the comparison →Three glimpses of a vegetable that's been on Roman dinner tables, in Charlemagne's gardens, and in your kitchen garden.
W. Atlee Burpee & Co. introduced the cultivar from their experimental farm in Pennsylvania over a century ago. It is one of the longest-lived vegetable varieties in continuous commercial cultivation, still chosen by gardeners who want a dependable, productive, full-flavoured chard.
His Historia Plantarum is the oldest surviving systematic botany text in the Western tradition, and chard appears in it as an already-domesticated kitchen staple, not an exotic novelty. By Theophrastus' time the plant had been on the table for at least a thousand years.
It is not. The market-standard 'Bright Lights' mix was selected by New Zealand amateur breeder John Eaton from heritage parent plants he found in a home garden in 1977, then refined by Johnny's Selected Seeds and released in 1998, where it won an All-America Selections award. No transgenic chard exists commercially. The colours are old.
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