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 photo credit: Mike the Gardener |
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| I promise I won’t make any Popeye references when I write about how to plant spinach at home. Ok, except for that one. I eat a lot of spinach. So it would make sense that I would tend to grow and plant spinach at home. Given how fast spinach grows and how easy it is to grow spinach from seeds, it is a no brainer that spinach is a part of my yearly home vegetable garden. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
How to Grow Spinach IndoorsAlthough I don’t show it in the video that accompanies this blog post, spinach is rather easy to grow indoors. When growing spinach in containers just make sure you choose a container that is a minimum of six inches in diameter to make spinach worth growing indoors. With a regular potting soil, spinach grows fairly well on a south facing window sill, but if you really want to get great production, use a simple grow light set up. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Planting Spinach at Home OutdoorsIn my zone, 7a, spinach is a great vegetable to start outdoors since it is cool weather tolerant. I’ll get more into dealing with your spinach bolting in the summer months in a moment. In the video I plant my spinach seeds in a square gardening format. That is, nine spinach seeds per square foot. I planted three square feet, giving me twenty-seven spinach plants. Spinach is a great vegetable to use in a square foot gardening application. Spinach roots are not very invasive, and while the spinach plant itself can get rather large (depending on the variety), it won’t overwhelm the space it is in. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Growing Spinach in the SummerSpinach will do better when temperatures are cooler, and if you live in the heat of Arizona, there will be times you won’t be able to grow it well at all. I have had spinach do well here in NJ during the summer months when temperatures exceed ninety degrees. I have found through trial and error that the plants I started during late April and early May, fair better as the summer months drag on. I have also learned that my spinach plants, when growing during the summer months, are less likely to bolt (more on that in a moment) when they receive partial shade during the hottest parts of the day, which for me is in the afternoon. Therefore, I tend to choose locations in my garden that get shaded as the afternoon sun moves on by. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
What is Spinach BoltingBolting means your plants have gone to seed. The leaves will taste too bitter to consume, thereby rendering your spinach plants useless for consumption, but you can keep them around if they are aesthetically pleasing to you. I tend to remove them and replace them with something else. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Planting Spinach in a Square Foot Vegetable GardenSubscribe to our channel | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| In the video I show you how I condition my soil, plant my spinach seeds and use the square foot garden method. Spinach is the perfect plant to cover these topics as you will see. Besides spinach being an easy plant to grow at home, it is a nutritious plant as well. How else do you think Popeye got all of that strength. (I couldn’t resist) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Happy gardening! | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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KEYWORDS:growing spinach in containers, how to grow spinach indoors, spinach plant spacing, harvesting spinach, how to plant spinach at home, spinach bolting, growing spinach in summer, how to grow spinach from cuttings | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
