Silverbeet comes of age

If you've ever wondered why free-range hens lay such wonderful eggs, I can tell you. It's because like all healthy youngsters, they eat their vegetables. Or, to be precise, they eat your vegetables.
The first year I had chooks they dined superbly - fancy lettuces, tomatoes, peppers, strawberries and tangelos.
The second year, I built them a run. It was generously proportioned and the menu was much the same except the food was left over. However, I felt guilty that they weren't getting living, growing food, so I constructed a vegetable garden inside the run and grew them a stunning crop of silverbeet.
I never ate silverbeet as a child. Spinach, yes, but silverbeet was considered a poor relation and even if the leaves were tolerable, the white stalks were absolutely not.
Then one evening, stuck for something fresh for dinner that could be made from three eggs, an exhausted potato and a well-past-its-use-by-date tomato, I found a recipe for a herby silverbeet frittata. I raided the chooks' vege garden and became an instant devotee.
One of the truly fabulous things about this working-class vegetable is that it is incredibly easy to grow.
Another fabulous thing? It grows pretty much all year round, even in colder areas.
If you want to sow from seed, plant them 2cm deep and then transplant into rows about 40cm apart. Plant into soil that's been enriched with plenty of rotted manure and add a handful of high-nitrogen plant food for good measure. Keep it watered and add fertiliser every six weeks or so.
Spring-planted silverbeet will continue to crop for months on end as long as you (or the chooks) pick it regularly.
Plant more every three months and you should never be without it. Avoid planting in the heat of mid-summer, or when it's frosty.
Pull leaves off as you need them, but don't strip silverbeet right down to its heart or you'll limit its growth. For this reason it's quite good to have your own patch that you don't share with chooks, as they are disinclined to obey this rule. Other than that, expect your silverbeet to be pretty much trouble-free.
If you're bothered by the fact that it's such a, well, ordinary plant, you might like to go for the fancy varieties with the colourful stalks.
That awful white stalk your mother made you eat now comes in rainbow colours of red, orange and pink, and looks brilliant when left raw in winter salads. Chooks appear not to have a preference.
Oh, one last thing about growing silverbeet. It thrives on chook manure. Now is that a marriage made in heaven, or what?