Tag Archives: spinach

Preparing for spring

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A little hard to believe-tomorrow we begin the first day of 10 hours of sunlight. This means we’ve come out of the Persephone period and plants will now begin to grow. It will be slow at first but will pick up as spring approaches. There’s still a lot of winter weather to deal with but the garden is ready to be warmed up. Some of the garden has been over-wintered and looks very good.

I usually begin covering my garden with plastic the first week of February so the soil will be ready to plant by February 17th. This year I’ll wait until the first week of March. The reason? I don’t seem to get ahead by the earlier starting date but it does add to my workload.

The next couple of weeks I’ll be selecting and ordering seeds. If you’ve been on my site much, you’ll already know my favorite places to buy. Johhny’s, Burpee, Jungs, and Territorial Seed. There’s a local place I like to buy from-Mountain Valley Seeds.

Crops I’ll be planting will be my regular early spring crops: several varieties of lettuce, spinach, claytonia, beet greens, tokyo bekana, corn salad, chard, bok choi, and maybe radicchio. My cool weather herbs have always been cilantro and chives[ois skin=”3″]

How does your cold frame grow?

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Here’s something fun to see. First picture(top)is October 15, 2016, second is 1/1/17, last one is 2/21/17. A simple sun box, not a cold frame, can do this for you as well. Nothing wrong with the cold frame, its just more work, more expensive, and fairly permanent. I’ve taken off the top sun box level for the last picture so you can see whats happened over the winter. Now I’ll begin to harvest whats in it. Good eating tonight!

I encourage everyone to grow their own food, even those in harsher climates that experience snow, below zero temperatures, wind chill, etc. It’s a rewarding feeling to come out after a hard winter, pull back the top and see whats underneath. I just began watering this box last week-thats 3 full months of no work! those wanting to see how easy a sun box is to assemble(and take apart), see my earlier post. So easy, and all made with wood material thats laying around the house.
Crops in this box are spinach, chard,and the lettuces of sweet repeat, allstar, and black seeded simpson.

One of the keys to growing is the soil. As I’ve said before, if the soil isn’t right, nothing else will really matter. If you live in the area and are interested in learning how to have really rich, fertile soil, I’ll be teaching class this upcoming Saturday. Composting is the answer. Once you learn the proper way to do it, you’ll ask yourself why you haven’t been doing it all along[ois skin=”3″]

My very small cold frame winter garden

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This is supposed to be a cold frame but it really isn’t.  I learned this idea from Mel Bartholomew many years ago, and he writes about it in his first book, which is a condensed version of what he wrote earlier in the publication of The Avant Gardener in 1978.  The article is long out of print so you wont be able to find it easily.  This is called a sun box.  A google search for sun box will give you nothing close to what this is.

What’s the difference between a cold frame and a sun box?  A cold frame is something that is usually fairly permanent, and usually fairly good sized.  It’s usually dig into the ground and placed at a low angle on the southern side of a yard to get as much of the sun as possible, especially in the winter months.  The back of traditional cold frames are much higher than the front and they can be pretty heavy and bulky.  It’s covered with a variety of things ranging from expensive, self venting tops to cheap things such as wood with plastic stapled to it to act as a protective covering over the top.  Cold frames can be very expensive or pretty cheap.

A sun box is different.  It is not dug into the ground.  It is not permanent.  The back is the same height as the front.  In fact, its nothing more than portable wood boxes that have been placed on top of each other.  Thats it.  They can be moved around, taken apart, added upon, etc. in about a minutes time.  They are great for last spring and summer.  When you tomatoes(or anything else) need to be hardened off and they begin to outgrow your cold frame, you’re almost forced to plant them in the garden.  All you need to do with a sun box is add another portably wood box on top of what you already have.  Then all I did was buy a $5 glass window at the Re-Store to place on top for protection.  We’ve had a tough winter so far with more coming.  As you can see, the salad greens have done amazingly well.  And I just had a small salad-it was wonderful.[ois skin=”3″]

The winter garden

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january-winter-garden-2017I thought it would be good to post on the first day of a new year. I hope this upcoming season is a great one for all! I also hope you’re using this time to think about, plan, and prepare for your garden, hopefully in early spring. We’ve got about 4 weeks before we hit the minimum 10 hours of daylight, where its a good idea to start planting certain cool weather crops. It does take longer to get them going and its more work. For those wanting to do less, you can still plant in early March and probably have a harvest around the same time as us early January planters.

This will be the first year in as long as I can remember that I wont be planting on Presidents Day weekend. I’m going to put it off until the first week of March. Right now the garden looks good, and I’ve been harvesting plenty of overwintered carrots, chard, beet greens, scallions, spinach, and small leaf lettuce varieties. The radishes are gone, but were good earlier in winter.

I’ve literally done nothing in my garden since November 28th. With the right crop varieties and the right protection, having a 4 season harvest is a very simple thing to do. There’s been no watering and only harvesting. In about 4 weeks it’ll begin to look pretty empty. I’ve got my compost ready to amend the soil when the time comes to get cranking on the early spring season.

One last note: my ebook is a few days from being released. I’ve been threatening now for 2 years and it’s finally here! Its an book about growing my favorite crop, lettuce, in the hot months of summer. For the most part, I’m pleased with the final product. I don’t consider myself to be a very good writer so it takes me a long time to finish. Its 12 pages long and will sell for $4.99. It talks about the 5 techniques I’ve used to successfully have lettuce all summer. I hope you’ll like it and will have a chance to give it a favorable review. I’m hoping to have it available on all the major online outlets very soon as well as here on my blog. Stay tuned.[ois skin=”3″]

Winter spinach-square foot gardening style

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winter spinach in the square foot gardenI had a good friend of mine tell me many years ago that if your spinach plants are established by the beginning of winter you could cut them back to just above the crown and you’d be the first person in your neighborhood to have fresh spring or even late winter spinach.  He said you didn’t even need to cover them as the snow would act as an insulator during the winter months.

Well, he was right about the earliness part.  I’m pretty sure I had the first spinach harvest in the neighborhood.  That particular year I took his advice and cut everything back and didn’t worry about protecting any of it.

By the time spring rolled around it certainly grew.  However, it grew unevenly-the leaves were more crinkled than what they normally would have been.  The biggest difference, however, was in the taste, which could best be described as close to shoe leather.  I learned that advice wasn’t going to work for me.

From then on out, I did cut back the crop in late fall, but I then protected it.  The difference in appearance and most importantly-taste-was huge.  Gone was the crinkle and shoe leather.  Back was the smooth texture and sweetness of the spinach I’d been used to eating all spring.  This picture is what it looked like today after being under cover since November.  The variety is Space, and it’s my favorite variety of spinach to grow.  This is the time that I direct seed my spinach for the earliest spring harvest that I can get[ois skin=”1″]