Of things spinach and succession planting

I was carrying on a gardening conversation with my friend Joann via Facebook recently. I mentioned spinach as an early spring crop possibility and she said she'd try it next year. But there's no time like the present and there's no reason to put yourself in a box about only planting once a season in your garden.

It's not too late to plant spinach this year even though you could have started sowing it back in late March. It likes cooler weather better but you can seed short rows (2-4 feet long) of it every week from now until the end of May. This way you get succession crops so when you finish the older stuff, the newer stuff becomes available. Also, once the spinach is up high enough, you can mulch it with straw to help keep the soil cooler and keep it from drying out too fast.

I've also planted spinach much later than the end of May. It's good to experiment and see what works for you. It may bolt but what did you lose if it does? A few minutes of planting and a few feet of your garden for a few weeks? Small price to pay.

A warm/hot weather option is New Zealand spinach which isn't a spinach at all (I think it's part of the onion family) but looks like and tastes like spinach when cooked. It also grows like crazy and only a couple/three plants will keep you in it. You can order it from online organic seed companies like Fedco.

Succession planting is one of the credos of one of my two gardening book mentors: Eliot Coleman (the other is Lee Reich). In his books (I have Four Season Harvest and The New Organic Grower), he recommends that you not relegate planting of a crop to the beginning of the growing season but to think of growing seasons as fluid where sowing and harvesting can overlap and be used to extend the harvest and maintain the freshness of your garden vegetables. In Four Season Harvest, Coleman provides a nice table of recommendations for succession planting summarized here:

Beans Every 2 weeks
Beets Every 2 weeks
Carrots Every 2 weeks
Celery Twice: early spring and three months before fall frost
Cucumbers A 2nd and 3rd planting at monthly intervals to keep quality high
Lettuce/greens Every week or two
Peas Twice: early spring and mid-summer
Radishes Every week
Spinach Every week in spring and late summer.
Squash A 2nd and 3rd planting at monthly intervals to keep quality high

My cousin Chris, the vintner at his family's winery, Lakewood Vineyards, and avid gardener turned me on to Eliot Coleman's books and methods. Coleman advocates low impact, quality yield organic growing methods that anyone can adopt and extend as their own. He farms in coastal Maine so he knows about late springs and early falls and how to adapt to grow and harvest crops all year long. And to prove that Coleman's suggestions work, my cousin Chris showed me his cold frame: the one he was dusting snow off of when he harvested salad greens in February! More on cold frames in a future post ;-)