I had just returned from the Farmer’s Market where I had gone in search of spinach. We didn’t get much spinach out of the garden this year so I thought it would be nice to buy some so that we would have more in the freezer to last through the winter. There wasn’t a single vendor at the market that had any spinach and I was told by one that “you can’t grow spinach this time of year.”
This got me thinking, why can’t you grow spinach this time of year? I’ve tried a second planting of spinach two years in a row and have yet to have any success. So I got on my computer and started doing some researching. As it turns out spinach is a cold weather crop; it does best in the spring and in the fall and it is one of a few plants whose seed has a very poor germinate rate. Also, if you plant spinach in the warmer months, it simply will not grow. Once temperatures reach 23C it becomes dormant; seeds will not germinate and plants simply refuse to grow.
As the weather was cooler and it was mid August, I got the crazy idea that I would try planting some spinach. I took to my computer again to see how I could increase my odds of success. One common suggestion that I kept coming across was to soak your seed and to get it to sprout before planting.
So here I was, August 13, soaking spinach seed for a fall planting.
After soaking the seeds for almost 24 hours, I transferred them onto damp paper towel that was laid on a plate and covered them with another damp paper towel placing another plate on top; it was kind of a damp paper towel and spinach seed sandwich with plates for the bread. The idea was to keep the seeds moist by keeping them in direct contact with the paper towel. Twice a day I sprayed the paper towel with water to keep it damp. After one day the seeds started to sprout. We left them in the paper towel sandwich for a few days and then planted them in garden.
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| Seeds Sprouting after a day on the damp paper towel. |
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| Sprouts planted. |
Once planted, we watered them regularly and waited for something to happen. Within 3 – 4 days it started to grow; and then it disappeared. Everyday we checked it and saw new growth but the next day it was gone. We had failed to take into account something very important. That something was the over abundant amount of grasshoppers; they were eating the spinach as fast as it could grow.
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| New growth to feed the grasshoppers. :( |
We tried covering the new growth to keep the grasshoppers from eating the spinach but then the weather turned unseasonably warm, we got tired of fighting the grasshoppers and eventually gave up. It was frustrating because if the grasshoppers weren’t so plentiful I would probably have a decent amount of spinach in the garden right now.
It was an interesting experiment and if grasshoppers are a non-issue, I will attempt a fall plantings of spinach in the future.
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