After 10 years of tending my own vegetable garden, I was feeling pretty successful. Each season I harvested lots of tomatoes, peas, lettuce, peppers and even a few more challenging crops like potatoes, onions and melons. But despite repeated tries, never had I produced a single salad bowlful of spinach. Either I planted the seeds too early in spring – tempted by a warm spell – and the little sprouts froze before they reached an edible size. Or I planted too late and the leaves turned bitter as the temperatures heated up in late spring. I had just about given up trying spinach (which my kids willingly eat only if the leaves are small and fresh-picked) when I met a gardener who told me she plants spinach in the fall. With her advice, I now harvest spinach in fall and early spring. In the process, I’ve discovered a whole new growing season.
Though the gardening bug bites most people in spring, fall is an ideal time for planting and growing just about everywhere but the frigid north. The warm, sunny days and cool, often damp, nights are comfortable conditions for many garden crops as well as for people working outside. By the end of summer, many common pest insects and weeds have completed their life cycles for the year, so they’re less likely to plague gardens in the fall. Best of all, there’s a unique satisfaction you get from serving a little homegrown food on Thanksgiving.
Spinach isn’t the only vegetable that thrives in the fall. Lettuce, kale, mache, and most other salad greens grow best in cooler, shorter days. If you have a month or so before your average first frost (you can check the date in your area at http://www.farmersalmanac.com/weather/a/average_frost_dates), you’ll get a nice autumn harvest of string beans, broccoli, beets, carrots, radishes, cabbages and leeks – all of which survive light frost once they are mature.
To get the two-season harvest of spinach, plant the seeds directly in your garden when nighttime temperatures are consistently 65 degrees F or cooler. After they come up and have more than two sets of true leaves (not the pair of embryonic leaves that nearly all plants start with), you can snip them to add to your salad bowl. Be sure to always let at least one pair of leaves remain on each plant so they can continue photosynthesizing and producing new leaves. When your local weather forecast predicts a hard frost, pack straw or shredded leaves in the bed almost as deep as the spinach is tall. That is, you should be just able to see the spinach tops. Let them alone all winter – they’ll even survive under snow. On the first warm days of spring, pull back the mulch. As soon as you see the plants growing again, you can start harvesting and eating your homegrown weeks before the spring planters sow their seeds.
Learn more about organic and gardening in fall at www.organicgardening.com.
Scott Meyer was Editor of Organic Gardening magazine and OrganicGardening.com from 2002-2009. He wrote/edited the chapter on gardening in the Whole Green Catalog.
