On a rainy Thursday afternoon, as workers in a Petaluma warehouse filled a few hundred cardboard boxes with bunches of crisp rainbow chard, snowy white turnips and freshly harvested oranges ...

Rainbow chard is available year round. Look for fresh green leaves and firm stalks with no signs of wilting or discolouration.

And there are plenty of choices, from the easiest vegetables to grow, like lettuce, to unusual varieties that are trickier to find on the shelves, like rainbow chard. A single packet of seeds ...

I love to use them in stews and chunky soups. Combining dried cannellini beans with chard makes a really hearty winter soup that will warm the whole family. The fennel adds another layer of ...

The rainbow chard can be substituted with silverbeet or try combining with spinach, curly kale or cavolo nero. If using cavolo nero remember to pull away its central stem as it can be coarse.