Surprise on top of compost bin puzzling to reader
Can you explain this puzzle? Beautiful Swiss chard plants with red, yellow and white stems staged an appearance atop my compost heap this year. I had planted a multi-coloured Swiss chard in the garden, but that was a few years ago. Also, these mystery plants are the sweetest chard I’ve ever tasted, wonderful simply steamed and served with butter, as well as in stirfries.
Swiss chard is a biennial plant, producing stems and leaves the first year and flowers and seeds the next year. Chard is fairly hardy, surviving most winters to regrow and send up seed stalks in the spring. Parsley follows the same pattern. In your initial planting’s second year, it is possible that you put stems bearing seeds into the compost, and some of the seeds germinated in the spring.
As plants self-sow in gardens, they often evolve into strains that are particularly well adapted to a garden’s growing conditions. In your case, the chard strain has also evolved to develop a superior taste.
The plants that gave you such good eating this year should survive the winter to produce more seed for you next year.
However, should severe frost threaten, it might be useful to cover them just for the freezing period with old, lightweight curtaining or floating row cover fabric. In one cold winter, when most gardens lost their radicchio plantings in a period of hard frost, I saved mine with three layers of floating row cover.
To perpetuate your personal strain of chard, harvest the seeds next year when they are dry and ripe, and sow them where you want new plants. I presume you’ll want to empty the compost heap at some point.
If not, let the plants shed their seeds and either let the seedlings grow where they fall or transplant them to a vegetable plot or garden bed. Multi-coloured Swiss chard plants are pretty enough for growing in a flower bed.