Fall in love with Spinach
Spinach is undergrown in many gardens because gardeners don't take the time to understand the plant, this guide provides that much-needed insight, including your fall target date, seed sources, bountiful fall varieties, overwintering, keep your seeds cool.
Garden & Yard
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Spinach is one of the most tender and delicious of all the
leafy green vegetables. Yet in many gardens this delightful
crop is absent. The reason? Many gardeners have been
frustrated because they plant spinach in the spring and get
only a small harvest of undersized, parched leaves before
the spindly central flower stalk appears, signaling the
plant is starting to bolt or run to seed.
What's the best remedy for the spring spinach blues? Plant
a fall crop! By planting spinach at the end of summer
you'll get your crop off to a running start and have it
mature to its luscious best during the cool, golden days of
fall. After several years of trialing spinach varieties and
gathering information from other spinach aficionados around
the country, I'm convinced spinach can have a jump in
popularity if we just keep it cool.
UNDERSTANDING SPINACH
To appreciate why spring-planted spinach misbehaves, one
must know its humble origins. Spinach is a cool-season
vegetable originally grown in the fall and winter in the
fertile agricultural valleys of the Middle East. In spring,
longer days and warmer temperatures trigger spinach to
finish its cycle and go to seed.
Spinach contains nutrients that help prevent cancer, heart
disease and age-related eye diseases.
While many modern spinach growers blame early hot weather
as the villain causing spinach to bolt, in actuality it is
the increasingly long days of spring, which signal the
plant to reproduce. Most modern spinach varieties will
initiate flowering when the days reach 14 hours, as early
as mid-May in the northern half of the United States.
The influence of hot weather, while more subtle, also has
an adverse effect on the quality of spinach sown in the
spring. Even mildly hot days in the upper 70s can
dramatically speed up the flowering of a spinach plant
that's already been triggered to bolt by day length. Also,
the tenderness and juiciness of the leaves is greatly
diminished after just a couple of days of hot spring
weather.
Certainly some gardeners claim success stories of
spring-planted spinach, but any gardener will be challenged
by the one-two punch of longer daylight hours and early hot
weather. Timing a fall crop properly can help you easily
avoid the pitfalls of spring, resulting in a bumper harvest
of succulent, huge, easy-to-pick spinach leaves. Just look
at the size of those leaves in the picture on top!
YOUR FALL TARGET DATE
Seed catalogs and gardening guides often advise gardeners
to plant their fall spinach crops four to six weeks before
a hard frost. In my own experience in both coastal
Washington State and southern Wisconsin, this means
planting between September 1and 10. Unfortunately this
strategy produces plants that are only about the diameter
of a teacup with leaves the size of silver dollars, before
the days become too cool for continued growth. This teacup
size is perfect for overwintering spinach (see
"Overwintering Spinach,") , but it doesn't produce the
yield a fall crop should.
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