After planting the chard out on 11 May, it has got going really quickly. This is some photos of our second cutting of chard, one a fortnight ago, and one yesterday.
Turns out chard is extremely fast growing
Chirpy Chard
Our chard was ready to plant out last weekend.
We found a little spot down the garden that we could squeeze it, so levelled the soil out and got ready to plant.
Before we planted the chard out, we gave them the “seaweed treatment”. This involves mixing up some Maxicrop Triple seaweed with water in a bucket and then submerging each plant for a minute or so until the plant has taken up some of the seaweed mixture.
When you first submerge the plant, air bubbles will come up from the pot, so you know that there’s room for some more seaweed to be taken up. When these bubbles start to slow down or stop, you’re done!
We then planted each chard about 6 inches apart. We’ve been reading up on it, and you can plant chard up to 1 foot apart. But we are going to settle with “mini leaves” to see how we get on.
We only had space for 10 out of the 11 plants, so the final one has been planted out into a 10 litre pot. We’ll see how this one does in comparison.
Somewhere over the…Rainbow Chard
We sowed our Fantasia and Intense rainbow chard on 24 March. One is orange, and one is red, so we’re hoping to grow a nice colourful crop with these!
We sowed one seed per cell in Seed and Modular compost, pushing each seed gently into the compost. We then covered these with vermiculite, a sheet of glass and some newspaper until they germinated.
After a couple of weeks, they had mostly germinated and were large enough to transplant. We potted them up into 3″ pots in multipurpose compost.
And now, another couple of weeks on – they look like this!
These will be ready to plant out soon. So we’ll keep you updated on progress!
