Chard. It’s hard with so much chard. As Jennifer Lopez might put it if she were in my gardening shoes, I used to have a little, now I have a lot. There was too little last year, for whatever reason. I probably did something wrong. This year, I sowed more. Come summer, the crop underwhelmed me again. So I sowed still more, throwing around seeds of as many varieties as I could get hold of. Then I went off to Croatia for most of August, where there is chard aplenty. That’s not why I go there, incidentally, but it suits me because I really like it, which is just as well because on the Adriatic coast it comes with every meal.
If you have not tried chard, I’d describe it as like spinach, but more substantial. In Croatian it’s called blitva, which oddly enough is the sound my belly starts making when I eat too much of it, as I do every summer there. It can get too much. In Split, I met a woman who was so sick of chard she got rather angry at the very mention of it. She was the cousin of the wife of a famous Serbian footballer I know. She wrote pop songs for a living, but she won’t be penning a love song to blitva any time soon, I can tell you that. As she started forking it off her plate on to mine, she spat out the word blitva as if it were a profanity rather than the sound of a stomach-gurgle. And now I, too, am taking its name in vain.
While I was away, my neighbour kindly watered my garden. I almost wish she hadn’t. My chard patch is now a chard jungle, featuring stems of many colours and leaves of all shades of green. Some of the leaves are so big that if I was naked they would cover not just my bits, but my whole lower half. Strip the leaves and I’m left with stems thick enough to do service as lethal weapons.
And it’s chard for breakfast, chard for lunch and chard for dinner. Chard for the freezer, chard for friends and more for enemies. Chard, chard, chard. I do love chard, but too much chard is hard.
• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
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