I adore chard, for a number of reasons.

Pick off the outer leaves and it just keeps producing. And producing. You’ll harvest from the same plants clear up through a killing frost.

Second reason: Very little of the plant is inedible. You can eat the stems and leaves, but not the roots. The only thing with a better ratio of edible to inedible is a beet. Compare that to, let’s say, a tomato plant. There’s a lot of biomass that ends up in the compost pile.

The third reason is a no-brainer: Chard is delicious.

Leaf miners think it’s delicious, too. I’ve written about leaf miners before. There are many types of “leaf mining” culprits, and I’m not sure which feast on chard (and spinach and beets …). The winged parents are nondescript little black flies and do no real damage. However, the larval stage of the insect is the typically white short worm you can see between the upper and lower dermis of the leaf, eating its way through the leaf in squiggly lines. The larvae can do a lot of eating. And there goes your beautiful chard leaf.

How to control leaf miners

We have tried two versions of a homemade insecticidal soap with differing degrees of success. Neither are 100% effective. And neither are specifically for leaf miners. In fact, I’m not even sure these soaps are ever in contact with the miners. I may be spraying the chard for naught.

But I have found one effective way of combating leaf miners: consistently removing infested leaves. Yes, I lose leaves. Yes, those little guys are persistent. But removing the leaves ensures that fewer leaf miner adult flies hang around. They aren’t completely gone from the garden, but they are more manageable.

BIG note here: DO NOT throw those removed leaves into a compost pile or keep them in the garden. Take them completely out of the garden and put them in a trash barrel or bag and tie it closed. When the adult flies emerge, they will be nowhere near the chard.