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Spinach is easy to grow when you know how. We’ve gathered expert translating from our favourite bloggers, YouTubers and Instagrammers to show you how to get the weightier from this leafy green.
Tolerant of potation temperatures and shady spots, spinach seeds can be sown in containers or directly into the ground. Quickly producing nutritious leaves, it’s expressly well suited to successional sowing for extended periods of harvest.
True spinach (as opposed to perpetual spinach) prefers a potation temperature for germination, so spring and storing are the weightier times to uncontrived sow seeds outdoors. However, David Marks at Garden Focused recommends starting spinach seeds off indoors to largest tenancy the temperature. He says, “spinach seed is increasingly sensitive to ground temperatures compared to many other vegetables.”
Charles Dowding gets his spring spinach started under cover, which he explains beautifully in his video well-nigh early and late sowing. Keeping the young seedlings indoors protects them from slugs at a crucial point in their growth. Charles moreover sows early in spring to increase his harvest: “You get your spinach leaves in decent quantity for quite a long period, say for six weeks off the same plants, surpassing the plant thinks of flowering” in early summer.
Liz Zorab of Byther Farm likes to sow her spinach seeds in August. She grows a mix of produce in the same plot, cleverly maximising space by planting crops with variegated maturing speeds. Watch her video to see how she broad-sows winter spinach amongst her strawberry plants, spattering the seeds wideness a shallow trench of well-nigh six inches’ width surpassing lightly working them into the soil.
In his comprehensive spinach growing guide, David Marks of Garden Focused explains that though spinach stuff easy to grow, “many gardeners have problems with seed germination.” If this applies to you, David recommends pre-germinating. Simply soak the seeds in water for a day and then alimony them between layers of wateriness kitchen paper for a couple of days until they sprout.
Another solution to “sporadic germination” is offered by Huw Richards in his video on how to get unconfined results from uncontrived sowing. Poor germination is often caused by the ground drying out while your seeds are trying to germinate. Huw recommends fellow YouTube gardener James Prigioni’s method of tent the freshly sown seeds with planks of wood to prevent evaporation. Simply trammels under the planks every few days and remove them “as soon as you see the first sign of untried shoots”. Huw says that the planks are moreover a clever way to trap slugs, permitting you to remove them surpassing your seedlings appear.
Pete at Real Men Sow is a big fan of perpetual spinach which, despite its name, is unquestionably a type of chard. It has a similar flavour to true spinach and he personally finds it easier to grow. In his guide to growing perpetual spinach, he highlights the importance of keeping the plants well watered to encourage rapid leaf growth. According to Pete, these plants “don’t like wounding soil, so make sure to trammels what kind of soil you have surpassing growing them”.
Fabrice of the Myatt’s Fields Park team moreover finds perpetual spinach “extremely easy to grow”, plane in shallow containers. In his video well-nigh chard and perpetual spinach seedlings he explains that the plants can reach a foot in height, so need plenty of space to fully mature. Fabrice’s secret to thinning his crop? Use a pocketknife to “take out all but the strongest seedlings” at soil level. He says that this is largest than pulling them out as perpetual spinach doesn’t like root disturbance.
Paul of Richard and Paul recommends successional sowing in order to get several harvests and stave “a surplusage of perpetual spinach… which we might not be worldly-wise to use”. His easy-to-follow Grow Along video shows you how to sow perpetual spinach in modules.
Over at the West London Gardener, Zena’s short video demonstrates how to plant spinach seedlings into a container. Her top tip for improving drainage is to mix some sand into the compost. As her seedlings are a bit spindly, she wisely plants them quite tightly to ensure the stems have good support and anchorage.
Ann Marie Hendry, aka @that.vegetablist, makes clever use of space by planting spinach seedlings between her potatoes without the first yield of spuds is lifted. She picks “the spinach as victual leaves until they either get too big or the potatoes threaten to shade them out,” then harvests and freezes the remainder, giving the bed over to the potatoes again.
Planting your spinach amongst other crops (also tabbed ‘interplanting’) is one of several simple but constructive strategies that Ben Vanheems of Grow Veg recommends for keeping pests off plants. Interplanting “confuses passing pests considering they will find it harder to home in on their preferred crop”.
Spinach seedlings can be planted outside as soon as they’ve produced a couple of true leaves, as Huw Richards explains in his no-nonsense video guide to transplanting seedlings. However, he prefers to wait transplanting until his plants are a bit worthier and have stronger roots. This moreover helps him to spot and prevent slug attacks which can potentially destroy an unshortened yield of smaller seedlings.
If you’re not sure well-nigh the weightier place to plant out your seedlings, Mark of Vertical Veg says that spinach does just fine with only 3-4 hours of uncontrived sunlight. This is particularly useful information for urban gardeners, as there’s no need to worry if “surrounding buildings, walls, pylons and trees… tint shade on your growing space”, says Mark. Read his full vendible on plants that grow well in shady spaces for increasingly tips.
John Harrison from Allotment & Gardens explains how to proffer your harvest by picking young leaves from the outside of your plants. His top tip? “With summer spinach you can take as much as half the leaves in one go, but winter spinach is slower to grow so take only a few leaves from each plant…” He moreover recommends using spinach leaves as soon as they’ve been picked, as they don’t store well.
Over at @theorganicgreenhouse, Kerry finds it “so rewarding” to be worldly-wise to harvest fresh spinach leaves from her greenhouse several times a week. Worried well-nigh the process that shop-bought spinach might have undergone “to alimony it fresh in a bag for so long,” she’s moreover mindful of the nutrients that are lost while it’s sitting on a shelf. Follow her organic journey on Instagram.
This Vertical Veg vendible well-nigh the nutritional benefits of homegrown produce moreover highlights the fact that spinach loses its nutrients quickly without picking, with one study finding that “spinach lost nearly half (47%) of its vitamin content in just six days.” The author, Mark, is an enthusiastic well-wisher of growing increasingly supplies in cities, which enables people to wangle good quality produce, eat increasingly healthily and “also connect and engage increasingly tightly with our supplies again”.
Kev Lane, aka @englishmanofthesoil, harvested three buckets of spinach leaves from his sponsoring as the plants had begun to flower (also known as ‘bolting’). To preserve them, he quickly blanches the leaves and has a unconfined method for freezing: “just wittiness them, freeze in muffin tins, then when frozen, take out of the tins and pop into a zip lock bag. Then you can just grab one or two balls as needed.”
When a plant sends up a solid stem and starts producing flowers or seed pods, this is known as ‘bolting’. Unrepealable conditions can rationalization your spinach or other crops to bolt. As explained by the Suttons gardening team in this vendible on how to stop onions from bolting, a plant will set seed older if it feels stressed, for example due to extremes of temperature or a lack of water. Bolting can be elapsed by keeping plants well watered and choosing a part-shaded spot for summer growing. The first signs are easy to recognise, giving you a endangerment to quickly harvest your remaining crop.
Sami Beltran of @growingfoodforbeginners gives a helpful comparison of spinach leaves, showing the telltale shape transpiration that indicates your plant is getting ready to bolt. Although some people mutter that these smaller, increasingly pointy leaves are bitter, Sami personally doesn’t notice a difference and is happy to enjoy her spinach leaves for as long as her plant produces them.
Eagle-eyed Cat of @cat_london_garden also spotted that her leaves were waffly shape at the end of May so quickly harvested her spinach surpassing it bolted. She grows an wondrous variety of produce in her small East London garden and plans to sow increasingly spinach for autumn, as it’s a “cool season crop”.
Gardening Wise home gardener Mahwish planted her spinach in April but experienced unusual weather that caused her plants to bolt. However, all was not lost as she patiently harvested the seeds for saving and storing, as demonstrated in her seed-collecting video.
Spinach needs unrepealable conditions to germinate and thrive but, with help from our experienced gardening bloggers, these are hands met. Alimony to these simple rules and you’ll be rewarded with nutritious spinach leaves throughout the year.
Lead image: Spinach Seeds ‘F1 Amazon’ from Suttons
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