How to Grow Spinach, Planting Spinach, Growing Spinach

How to grow spinach plants in your backyard vegetable garden. Easy tips for how to plant, grow, care for, and harvest spinach plants when vegetable gardening. Recommended spinach varieties below.

Design Your Own Vegetable Garden Layout Using our Free "Vegetable Garden Planner" Software!

It is easy to learn how to grow spinach. In fact, the vegetable usually makes any top ten lists you ever see of the easiest vegetables grown.

The other nine that typically make the list are as follows: tomatoes, beets, green beans, lettuce, potatoes, radishes, rhubarb, onions, and Swiss chard.

Melody Spinach Variety

It is ready for harvest in 42 days. Makes a colorful and tasty addition to garden salads.

Despite the development of spinach varieties that can stand the summer heat, the vegetable is an early summer crop for most of us with far too short a season.

How to Grow Spinach

Download Free Garden Planning Worksheets, Garden Diary, Zone Chart, Or Planting Guide

Spinach needs cool temperatures for a successful harvest.

Plant in early spring.

The plants prefer sun to partial shade.

The vegetable matures fast, in about 40 days, meaning that its bed will soon be available for summer producers such as snap beans or Swiss chard.

If you want spinach for freezing as well as fresh, you can sow several rows without sacrificing valuable lot space for summertime growing.

Even if your vegetable garden is limited to a few window boxes, grow a few spinach plants to enjoy raw in salads.

Planting Spinach Plants

Adding manure improves the water-retention of the soil, adds nutrients, and makes it more workable.

Mix a high-nitrogen fertilizer such as 10-6-4 at a rate of 1 pound per 100 square feet into the soil prior to sowing the seed.

Apply liquid fertilizer such as fish emulsions after the plants have been thinned out.

Sow seed up to 15 inches apart.

Use the "thinnings" as baby spinach in salads!

Harvesting Spinach Plants

The entire spinach plant can be harvested in about 40 days or you can pick individual leaves as needed for the outside of the clumps.

Storing Spinach

Before freezing, blanch spinach leaves in boiling water for a couple of minutes. Press out most of the liquid before bagging it in freezer bags.

For convenience, it is best to freeze spinach in the size portions that you expect to use. Spinach, like certain other greens, wilts in the pot.

You will need up to 1 ½ pounds of spinach to obtain a freezable pint. If you puree or chop the blanched spinach, count on getting only about one cup per pound.

Pssst ... Don't tell the children!

Contrary to what Popeye believes spinach contains no more iron than most other green vegetables. At the end of the 19th century, spinach's reputation for imparting exceptional strength arose when a leading scientist was researching its nutritional properties. When noting its iron content, he put the decimal in the wrong place!

Kids Corner

Using an old wooden wagon wheel is a colorful way to get kids involved in growing their own vegetables.

The spokes of the wheel can neatly divide the vegetable gardening area into separate sections.

You can let the children paint each spoke a different color to represent the vegetable that will be planted there.

In order for the children to see fast results from their hard work, include some quick-growing vegetables such as radishes, scallions, spinach, chard, and arugula.

Old Saying about the Garden

Back To Top

How to Grow Spinach to Vegetable Gardening

You Might Also like to Read:

"Get the Dirt!" on Vegetable Gardening! > > A FREE Vegetable Gardening Tips and Ideas Newsletter < < "Where to begin with my own vegetable garden? I need some help!" Should I just try planting some seeds in the ground? Is there more to vegetable gardening than meets the eye? How about a container garden? Get the answers, tips, ideas, and more by subscribing to our FREE "Get the Dirt" newsletter.

New! Comments