Spinach has a large number of uses in the kitchen, from side salads, soups, chip and vegetable dips, to stuffings for all sorts of entrees. If you’re growing spinach at home, you can savor all these with garden-fresh produce from your own back garden. And as a bonus, it actually grows quite quickly, from seed to harvest in just one and a half months. Additionally, it’s a cool-weather plant which will help you fill in your garden and rotate crops in the winter months, which is great to condition and replenish your soil.

Growing Spinach

Starting with the soil, make sure you have a high loam content, with a high level of nitrogen. The pH should be approximately 6.5. Spinach is very sensitive to acidity, so you’ll want to get your soil tested to confirm the pH is high enough (low pH is acidic, high pH is basic, and 7.0 is a neutral pH). As mentioned before, spinach favors cool weather, so your soil doesn’t need to be too warm to get started - 50F should do, but try to make sure you don’t encounter huge temperature swings and major frosts in the upcoming weeks.

Moving on to seeds, it’s best to use somewhat fresh ones, although spinach seeds can store up to 3 years before planting. When sowing your spinach seeds, put them about 1/2” deep into the ground, and space them at 4-6” linearly, with 12” between rows. There’s a reason for keeping them spread out like this, and that’s so that thinning is kept to a minimum. Spinach roots are very sensitive as seedlings, so having to transplant or disrupt seedlings too close together can cause damage to them. So it’s best to give them room to grow. Just think of it as trading space for time or effort.

Once in the ground, just make sure that the spinach receives enough water. It needs a minimum of 0.75 inches weekly.

Issues

There are 2 common issues to know about when growing spinach. The first issue concerns molds and fungi. Spinach prefers cool and damp environments, but so does fungus and mold. Take the proper precautions to make sure that water doesn’t linger longer than needed. This includes ensuring that the area is well ventilated (the spacing should help with this) and well drained. You can also do your manual watering in the late morning, to promote evaporation. Secondly, if your spinach grows slowly and shows signs of yellowing leaves, you may be using a soil that’s too acidic, as mentioned above. Prevention is the best solution here, so you may want to get your soil analyzed before growing.

Harvesting

Once your spinach has grown enough, you can start harvesting. Just cut the outer leaves off with a knife, a few inches from the ground. Leave the inner leaves to continue growing. Spinach is great in this regard, as you can just pull as much as you need at a time, and let it continue growing for later.