One vegetable. A whole website.
Beautiful in the garden bed. Superb on the plate.
Silverbeet (Beta vulgaris var. cicla) is easy to grow, rich in nutrients, and endlessly versatile in the kitchen. Here you'll find everything from seed to finished dinner.
Right now in the silverbeet year
Early summer
What to do
Plants establish quickly and grow fast. Thin where you sowed densely, and use the small leaves in salads. Lay down straw or grass clippings as mulch to retain moisture. Steady watering matters more than volume; 2.5 cm per week is a good rule.
Tip
Pinch off baby leaves regularly, even when you do not need them. It keeps the plant producing leaves rather than going to seed.
The Family
It shares its species with beetroot, sugar beet, and fodder beet. Same plant, bred for different parts.
Same plant, bred into entirely different crops.
Packed with Vitamins K, A, and C. Discover exactly what you get per 100g.
Explore nutrition →Sixteen simple recipes to make the most of your harvest, from frittata to dal.
Cook something →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.
Lexicon
Forty-two short entries on the words you meet around silverbeet, from fruit cluster to chiffonade and oxalic acid, each tied to the plant you grow and eat.
Open the lexicon →The Silverbeet Kitchen
Recipes, techniques, and seasonal collections that take you from freshly harvested leaves to dinner on the table. Start with a collection, or find tonight's dish.
Explore the kitchen