| Spinach Versatile greens add texture
and nutrients to everyday salads
Even if you
don't like spinach cooked, you may take to its crispness and dark-green color. Salad
dressings just love to hug the veins and subtle valleys found in a spinach leaf.
Spinach doesn't like heat and humidity. In this area you can plant spinach year-round
except June, July and early August.
Other vegetables to plant in September include: snap beans, cabbage, kale, lettuce,
onion, beet, carrot, mustard, cauliflower, winter radish and turnip.
Many local garden centers offer free calendars of when and how vegetables should be
planted; Virginia Cooperative Extension offices also offer free brochures on vegetable
gardens.
SPINACH AT A GLANCE
SPECIES: Spinacia oleracea
SIZE: Mound of long-stemmed leaves that can reach 12 inches high, 18 inches wide.
VARIETIES: Bloomsdale, Tyee Hybrid, Early Hybrid, Melody and Vienna. Melody tolerates
heat; Vienna can be seeded late September to winter over for harvest in March and April.
DESCRIPTION: Fast-growing, cool-loving annual with dark green leaves grown for salads
and cooked greens. Major difference among hybrids is earliness, resistance to bolting - or
producing a tall stalk - and diseases, and texture.
CULTURE: Plant after worst of hot weather is gone and again in early spring as soon as
ground can be worked again. Sow 3-6 inches apart in raised beds as early as soil can be
worked in spring; make short rows 10 days apart to have succession crops. Temperatures
below 20 degrees Fahrenheit can kill spinach. Thin new seedlings; feed with high-nitrogen
fertilizer.
HARVEST: Young, tender leaves best for salads and cooking. Snap off outer leaves or
shear entire plant to 3-4 inches. When the central stem starts to elongate, the plant is
starting to bolt.
PROBLEMS: Watch for leaf-miner damage; there will be signs of burrowing between the top
and bottom layers of leaves, plus dead tissue. Pull off affected leaves and throw in
garbage, not compost heap, because diseased leaves will contaminate compost. |
