Chard / Swiss Chard (Beta vulgaris)

Month on the bottom, temperature up the side. The pale green background is what the plant can survive at all -- fatal above or below it, labelled directly on the chart where that applies to your zone. The coral band is its ideal range, and only fades in during the months this zone would actually have the crop in the ground -- reusing the exact same sowing/harvesting data as the calendar further down the page. The blue line is real monthly climate data (not a modelled estimate) for a representative rural/agricultural location in this zone -- a small farming town or agricultural research station rather than a major city, to avoid the warmer bias city weather stations have. For the actual verdict on how well this crop does in your zone, see the badge at the top of the page -- that's based on the site's own researched yield figures, not this chart.

1. Sow direct. Sow seed direct where it's going to grow, thinning seedlings once they're large enough to handle -- like beetroot, each seed is actually a small cluster that produces multiple seedlings.
2. Keep watering even. Consistent moisture keeps the long harvest window going -- chard tolerates real heat, but drying out still checks growth and encourages bolting.
3. Harvest outer leaves, not the whole plant. Cut individual outer leaves as needed rather than harvesting the whole plant at once -- this is what lets a single sowing keep producing for months.
4. Let the centre keep growing. Always leave the central growing point intact when picking -- damage it and the whole plant stops producing new leaves.
5. Keep picking through mild frost. Chard tolerates mild frost well, so keep harvesting into autumn and even winter in milder zones rather than stopping at the first cold snap.

Pick your zone under "Temperature Range by Month" above and this updates too. Notice the harvest window is unusually wide compared to most crops on this site -- a direct result of chard's cut-and-come-again habit letting one sowing keep producing across several months. Arid shows no window at all, since this site's own yield data marks chard as not viable there.

Chard is a nutrition crop, not a calorie one -- about 190 kcal per kg. Subtropical and Maritime zones give the best yields here.

Figures per plant sown, from the site's own crop database. Because chard is cut-and-come-again, one plant continues yielding across the whole harvest window shown above -- these figures represent cumulative output, not a single cut.

Chard varieties mostly differ in stem colour -- purely visual, since flavour is broadly similar across the board. All the varieties below are open-pollinated (OP), meaning seed saved from them breeds true and is worth keeping under this site's seed-saving approach; none are F1 hybrids.

Chard, beetroot and perpetual spinach are all the same species (Beta vulgaris) grown for different parts of the plant -- letting any two flower nearby produces an unpredictable cross instead of true seed from either.

Chard isn't described as a storage crop in the site's own crop data -- its value is a very long cut-and-come-again fresh-eating window rather than something to bank for later.

Beyond fresh eating, chard freezes reasonably well after blanching, and the stems in particular can be pickled -- practical ways to use up a genuine glut rather than long-term staple storage.

Chard is a relatively trouble-free crop -- leaf miner is the main pest to watch for, similar to beetroot and spinach, its larvae tunnelling visibly inside the leaves.

Removing and destroying affected leaves as soon as mining is spotted is the main input-free defence -- picking regularly for eating already does much of this work naturally.

Crop rotation alongside beetroot matters here too, since they share the same species and similar pest and disease pressure -- avoid growing chard or beetroot in the same spot two years running.