Confession time: I grow silver beet because I hate it. If I had to buy silverbeet, it would linger in the fridge till it became green sludge that even the chooks would refuse to peck at, much less me. Ditto spinach and similar green leaves. If it's a dark green leaf, it's boring. What am I? A koala?
Sadly, green leafed veg is exceptionally good for you, unless you are prone to kidney stones. The oxalates in silver beet and spinach can bind to calcium, so consult your doctor, not a gardening writer, though your doctor may well say keep eating it, but in moderation.
Silverbeet provides power leaves of vitamins and minerals. A single half cup of raw silverbeet can give you a healthy portion of just about every vitamin and mineral you need, especially magnesium, vitamin K, vitamin A and carotene, in only about 20 kilocalories. It's full of polyphenols and antioxidants that just possibly may help to prevent inflammation. The more enthusiastic (and less substantiated) websites also claim silverbeet and spinach leaves may help to maintain blood sugar levels, reduce blood cholesterol, help lower blood pressure, reduce the amount of oxygen needed during exercise and improve everything from your backyard game of volleyball to your possible Olympic marathon. They don't quite say that if we all munched enough green leaves we'd achieve not just health but human compassion, world peace and cooperation, but the implication hovers.
Why does a tasteless green leaf with the texture of a, well, leaf, have to be so blasted well good for you?
I suspect the rest of humanity feels much the same way as I do about green leaves: deeply uninterested. Humans pick ripe mulberries, strawberries or apples in passing - or even pause and gobble for a while - but I have never seen anyone casually pick a green leaf and chomp it with delight, except a wombat, and even she was an exception to general wombathood.
Those green silverbeet leaves are not just good for us - the plant is also almost unkillable, which means that in hard times there is still plenty of it. The roots go deep down, fast, even into the shaley soil much of Canberra sits on. It withers in drought but comes back with rain. It will survive the worst frost our climate can throw at it. Give it just three hours of sunlight, and you will get a crop. It will also survive hail storms, being bounced on by kids playing football, and heat. I haven't yet backed a truck over our silverbeet patch but have every confidence that within a week it would have new leaves poking up.
This combined lack of taste, nutritional excellence, and general abundance is probably why there are so many recipes for turning silverbeet (also known as chard) and spinach into delicious dishes where the leaves just provide bulk and nutrition, and the other ingredients give flavour. Sadly, most are so totally calorie rich and irresistible I'd turn into a land-locked Skywhale if I ate them every day.
There's silverbeet sautéed in olive oil with lemon juice, currants and pine nuts; silver beet pureed with butter; phyllo pastry triangles of fetta and chard; creamy silverbeet dips; silverbeet with cheese sauce in crepes; silverbeet topped with a poached egg and hollandaise sauce; silverbeet and fetta bread rolls; silverbeet souffle; as well as chard souflop, which is when you heat up the souffle leftovers for breakfast.
There are even sweet recipes for silverbeet, like pies or dumplings made from slightly sweet pastry, filled with pureed silverbeet, orange zest and plump currants soaked in orange juice, or even orange juice and rum, which definitely makes you forget you are supposedly eating health food.
It's taken me decades to realise that as chard is pretty much tasteless, you can add it to almost anything, including an extra luscious ice-cream I have been indulging in a lot lately. Actually it has no cream or dairy in it, just veg and fruit, but feels and tastes like the best "true" ice-cream you've ever scooped into a bowl, eaten, and then gone back for a third helping.
Take half an apple, puree with a cup of raw silver beet leaf, minus stalks, then add half a sliced frozen banana and three tablespoons of frozen blueberries. You now have a very low calorie, glorious blue "ice-cream". Try the same method with any frozen fruit added to the purred silver beet - it will be wonderful, though you need to get used to green ice-cream unless you add blueberries. Finally, I am eating green leaves with joy every summer afternoon without an increase in dress size.
This is despite the fact that somehow I forgot to plant silverbeet this year. But last year's plants are still growing triffid-like outside my study window, taller than I am, or they would be if they weren't leaning over the fence, with every long seed-topped stem still producing small tender leaves which should last us till at least early February. By then the silverbeet I have planted this week will be bearing small leaves, which should become giant leaves to feed us through winter, though in the cold months I may forgo the "ice-cream" and sip a thin silverbeet broth, a bit like a vegetable herbal tea, with the green leaves puréed into the chicken or stock.
Ford Hook Giant is possibly the largest and most prolific silverbeet variety. 'Lucullus' is smaller but a bit more tender and there are red-ribbed forms, such as 'Ruby Chard' as well as 'Rainbow Chard', a mix of red, pink, and yellow stems, which look pretty but don't give you nearly as much leaf. On the other hand, even the least productive silverbeet is going to give you lots.
You can bung the seed or seedlings into you garden at any warm time of year, like now, and you'll be eating them within a month. Try to keep them free of weeds when young, and water and feed lavishly, as all that green leaf has to come from somewhere. The seedlings won't be hardy till they have really got their roots in the soil, so cosset for a few weeks till they get going.
Mulching them is good, but then so is mulching the entire garden. The only real problem may be rust, or possibly burn marks if you throw artificial fertiliser on the leaves and don't wash it off - never give artificial fertiliser without watering it in well. There is no real prevention for rust, except keeping each plant parted from other silverbeet bushes so the rust doesn't spread. The rust you may get on silver beet plants isn't the same as the rust on roses etc. Luckily our winters are usually cold enough to kill rust spores.
Like all our common veg, silverbeet was once a wild plant. They seemed to have been first domesticated - the best varieties kept, year after year, so the quality and quality gradually improves - on Sicily, then spread with the Roman armies through Europe, along with apples and grapevines.
It's time to grab a few handfuls of green leaves from the garden, whip up my afternoon treat, and eat with the smug knowledge that it is all homegrown, fantastically nutritious, and with zero travel miles and few calories. This is one "ice-cream" where you can be totally, virtuously gluttonous.
This week I am:
- Actually going to plant some silver beet seeds, but not more beans, corn, zucchini et al as I used to when we fed more people, as we probably won't get around to eating more than one crop.
- Pulling out gone-to-seed broccolini, parsley and the broad beans that have finally stopped bearing after three months - I've never known such a season for broad beans - to make room for the "big planting" of veg that need to be planted in February for eating though autumn and spring.
- Checking the garden for feral agapanthus seedlings, but even though the clumps get larger and more spectacular each year, so far the sterile varieties haven't put out viable seeds and become weeds. Yet.
- Weeding. Our vegetable gardens were pretty seed-free for years, but the drought and gale winds of the Black Sumer carried weeds here that I've never had before, and dropped them on bare soil. It's going to take years to clear them.
- No longer imagining I can hear the grass grow when I am asleep. It's finally slowed to "reasonable".
- Placing fragrant roses in bud vases on my desk, and giant heads of hydrangea or agapanthus in the vases. The summer salvias look stunning, but the cut ones only last a few days.
- Making zucchini slice, stuffed zucchini and offering far too many zucchini to wary friends.
