Growing Spinach, the Cold-Loving SUPER Green

Most gardeners treat spinach like lettuce, but it's a much more temperamental plant. If you don't treat it right or understand how it grows, you'll end up with a bitter, flowering mess. So in this video, I'm going to go over everything you need to know to grow successful, delicious spinach at home. Based on all the historical texts we know, spinach originated in Persia, where modern-day Iran and neighboring countries are today. From Persia, it spread all around the world. In China, it was known as the Persian vegetable, and in Europe, it was made famous by Catherine de' Medici with spinach florentine, something you've probably seen at a restaurant. If you're like me, you probably first heard about canned spinach through watching Popeye. He used to chug that thing by the can, growing jacked biceps. But it turns out we also associate it with a lot of iron, and it's not really true. Some people think that it was a little scientific error where they didn't carry the decimal place. After I did a little bit of research, that also doesn't seem to be true. So I think people just think it has a lot of iron, but it does have plenty of nutrition. It has all the vitamins like vitamin K, C, and A. And it does, of course, have some iron, but it's not going to make you a Jack this Popeye. But it is still delicious. So now let's go over some wonderful varieties that you could grow at home. The first one I want to talk about is matador. This one has very smooth leaves, and it's known for growing really well in the fall months. Bloomsdale is a classic variety. It's actually an heirloom from the 1800s, and it's wonderful for baby grains. You could get them in like 28 days, and it's also known for doing really well in containers. If you're somebody who suffers from the terrible disease called Downy Mildew, then you might want to try growing Oceanside Spinach. It has some resistance to it. And again, this one is known for growing well as baby grains or fully mature spinach. And for those of us in warmer climates, Lavewa is perfect because it has some degree of pea tolerance and mildew resistance. But for a guaranteed winner, Space Spinach is a great recommendation because it has high bolt resistance. It's upright so the leaves don't get as dirty. And of course, like all spinach, as I've mentioned, it can be grown as both baby and fully mature grains. This last one isn't really technically spinach. It's New Zealand spinach. It cooks very similar to spinach. But the great thing about this is that it's perennial. You could grow it in the middle of summer. Does not matter how hot it is. And you'll get spinach-like greens at the very least. Spinach is truly a cool season crop. You really don't want to bother growing it in the middle of summer for a variety of reasons. One of them will trigger bolting no matter what, but we'll get to that a little bit later. But the first thing is just heat. Spinach does not tolerate heat well. It likes cool soil. Somewhere in the range of around 50 degrees is ideal for germination. And it doesn't really want to get much hotter than that. Once you get into those 70-80 degree days, it's going to start struggling and probably go to bolt. That is one of the triggers. Another thing you need to know about spinach is that it does not tolerate acidic soil. Anything lower than 6 will lead to yellow leaves, and you're just not going to have a good time. Now whenever you're growing spinach at home, we prefer to grow them in something like the 16 cell because if you've ever cooked spinach, you know that those leaves are going to turn into nothing. So you want as many plants as you could possibly get. The 16 cells makes that easy. But there is one thing you should know is that spinach has a taproot. So if you are going to transplant them, this is pretty much where you want to do it. When they have 2 to 4, 6 leaves max, anything longer than that, and you're going to stunt the taproot, and it's just going to bolt early. Now if you want to direct seed your spinach, all you have to do is keep it simple. They're pretty decently sized seeds, so what I like to do is just make a little divot, at most half an inch depth. And I'll put like 2 to 3 seeds in, bury it in, and then the next plant is going to be roughly 6 inches away. If you plant spinach too close together, they tend to overcompete, and that also leads to bolting. So now your spinach is growing, how do you actually harvest it? Well this is one of those sort of cut and come again crops. So the best way to do it is to come all around the edge here, and pick these outer leaves. What's going to happen is that the central heart of the plant right here is going to keep producing leaves, they'll keep spreading, but you don't want to take that middle section or else it will stop growing. So let me harvest all these, and we'll talk about how to keep this harvest continuous. Remember that with pretty much every plant, the more you harvest it, the more it's going to grow. That's what it wants to do. If it just sits there and has all of its leaves forever, it'll just bolt because it thinks its job is done. So once we've harvested this plant, the other thing you should know about spinach is that it is a leafy green, which means that it loves a lot of nitrogen, and fertilizer will help you get even more harvest sooner. So what I'm going to do here is take some of this happy frog tomato and vegetable fertilizer, and I'm going to sprinkle it all around the plant, just like so. And once your fertilizer is in, you definitely want to mix it into the soil. If you leave it on the surface, it's not going to really do anything for this plant. So just make sure you're harvesting continuously, and then ever so often, give it a little bit of nitrogen, and it's going to pay you back with a much bigger harvest. If you're wondering why I've been carrying around this set of transplants, but not putting them in the ground, now's the perfect time. When you're growing spinach, you don't want to plant everything at once, you want a succession so. So now that these are matured and we're getting harvest out of them, what I want to do is plant some more spinach right next to it, at least close enough with that six inch spacing. And now what's going to happen is that if this plant bolts, this guy will just be coming in, and I will have a longer harvest window. So that's why you always want to be sowing spinach. It's not something that you sow a single time and just walk away. It's something you want to continuously plant if you want to continuously harvest it. So now that we know how to successfully grow the spinach, how do we stop it from bolting? I mentioned earlier that temperature is a big predictor, really temps over 75. Will encourage it to bolt, but it is not the major factor. That's because spinach is a day obligate plant, which means that once the sunlight hours reaches a certain threshold, it's just going to go to flower no matter what you do. And that period of time is right around 13 to 14 hours, which is pretty much summer. So when you're thinking about planting spinach in your garden, it's not about necessarily dates. It's more about planting windows. The period of time where you have cooler weather and the sunlight is not over 13 hours and that pretty much leaves you for the solar seasons. Spring and fall into winter. Remember that spinach is an extremely, extremely cold tolerant plant. It could be buried in snow and it'll be just fine. So fall might be a great option for you if you are in a colder climate. If you're in a warmer climate like me, spring is really your best bet. The other things you could do is always choose a bolt resistant variety if that's something that you struggle with. Never plant it in full sun and maybe even use a little bit of shade cloth. As long as you succession sow it and continuously feed it, you'll get more spinach than you even know what to do with. And if you're looking for other crops that can grow in under a month, check this video out over here. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.