Quick Reference
When to Start |
As soon as soil can be worked.
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Crop Rotation |
Avoid planting in the same spot that legumes grew in the previous year. Excellent cover crop to precede next year's vegetables.
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How To Plant |
Plant seeds 1/2" deep in rows spaced 1 foot apart
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Spacing and Support |
Start seeds 1" apart. You want the leaves to stay small so overcrowding is OK here.
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When to Harvest |
When leaves are 2"-3" long. Any bigger than that they become tough and bitter. Does not tolerate heat so harvest early and often before it goes to seed
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Storage |
Will stay good for a week or so in the vegetable crisper. For long term can be frozen.
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I will never forget asking my mother to buy me some spinach so I could get jacked like Popeye. She was barely able to hold back her laughter as she served it to me, knowing I was going to hate it. And that's because the only way you should be eating cold spinach out of a can is if the world has descended into chaos and you're hiding in your neighbor's survival bunker. I swore off spinach for years after that, not even trying it again until I was in my 20's after hearing all of the health benefits that come from eating it. Now I love it whether it's cooked, used as the base for a salad, on sandwiches instead of lettuce, or even better inside a puffed pastry. It also grows so quickly and can be started ASAP so it's likely the first thing you'll have a chance to eat from the new year's garden. And nothing else will give you the chance to bust out your Uncle Joey from Full House Popeye impression, which is reason enough to grow it.
When To Start
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Spinach is one of those "as soon as the soil can be worked" vegetables, but of course that is oversimplifying it. You can definitely plant your seeds whenever you want, but they will only germinate and grow when the soil reaches a certain temperature. Seeds will germinate when the soil is between 50-75 degrees, and optimal growing temperature is 60-65 degrees. Have we ever actually considered the soil temperature? No, we haven't. After 6 months locked inside I'm getting my garden going as soon as humanly possible.
Spinach is a cold tolerant plant that hates the heat of mid-summer. Once you get to late June/early July the plant will be sending up shoots and trying to go to seed. However since it does grow so quickly and do well in cold temps, you can plant a 2nd wave in late August/early September when the nights start to get cool again but the soil is still plenty warm from the sunny days. Spinach comes quickly and goes from tasty to inedible once the leaves get bigger than a few inches. If you're hoping to eat spinach for weeks and not get a ton all at once, plant your spinach in waves. Start a row ASAP, then wait 1-2 weeks and start another row. When your original planting is just about gone or overgrown you'll have some young reinforcements ready to go. |
Crop Rotation
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Avoid planting spinach in the same spot that legumes grew in the previous year. Spinach is an excellent crop to precede any other plant type, so if you have an area of the garden that doesn't do all that well, plant a bunch of spinach there. Whatever you don't eat just work right into the soil and that should improve the growing conditions for that same spot next year.
Click here to read about crop rotation and why it is so important It's important to not only avoid planting the same crop in the same spot 2 years in a row, but you also have to avoid plants in the same family as they typically draw on the same nutrients and have issues with the same pests. Click here to learn more about plant families and find a chart showing which ones are related. |
How to Plant
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Direct sow seeds right into the garden when the time comes. Seeds should be planted in very shallow dirt, about 1/2" below the surface.
Even if you don't have a garden it's easy to grow spinach indoors. Spinach grows quickly and has shallow roots so it will do well in containers as long as you have natural sunlight or an artificial grow light. |
Spacing and Support
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Plant seeds every 1" in rows spaced 1 foot apart. Thinning is not necessary with spinach because unlike other plants you don't want to give them too much room to stretch out. The smaller the leaves are the better they taste, so planting them close like this will help to keep them under control. You'll be naturally thinning them by removing the largest leaves to eat as they come in.
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Harvesting
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Leaves will be ready for harvest when they are 2-3 inches long, which could be as soon as 7-10 days after planting. Since it grows so fast, you could plant your spinach in waves so that it doesn't all come at once. If you have room for a few rows, plant them 1-2 weeks apart. Once your first row becomes overgrown and starts to go to seed, you'll still have a row or 2 of young leaves to pick from.
Continue cutting the largest leaves from each plant as it grows to let the plant keep producing new ones. Or if you have a plant full of mature leaves, cut the entire plant an inch or 2 above the soil. If there is enough time left and conditions are right the plant will grow back since it's roots are still in tact. |
What to do with way too many of them
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Once spinach becomes overgrown the best place for it is probably the compost pile. Older/larger leaves are tough and bitter.
If you have a lot to harvest and want it to last longer than a week in the fridge, you can just freeze it in Ziploc bags. No it's never going to be a salad green again but there are a lot of uses for frozen spinach, and imagine pulling out your own instead of that brick of who-knows-what from the freezer section of the grocery store. |