Spinach Seeds, Growing Spinach from Seed, Planting Spinach

The best tips for planting spinach seeds in your backyard vegetable garden. Learn how to plant, grow, care for, and harvest spinach plants grown from seed planted in your garden. If Popeye had known how to grow spinach, he would have realized how much better tasting fresh greens are from the garden than from a can!

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When to Plant Spinach

Spinach is frost tolerant and grows best in cool weather.

Direct seed it in the garden in the springtime as soon as the ground can be worked.

You can start seeds in flats indoors several weeks prior to the last expected frost.

The plants are one of the first garden greens to arrive in spring.

Planting Spinach Seeds

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Growing Spinach

Good companion plants for spinach include celery, onion, legumes, lettuce, pea, radish, and the cabbage family. Not so good garden bedfellows are potatoes. Stop planting spinach when the warm weather crops go in. Commence sowing again in late summer.

Vegetable Gardening Tip for Growing Spinach from Seeds

A Hot Weather Variety

If you wish you could still enjoy fresh spinach in the summertime, there is a hot weather plant variety that tastes similar to spinach. Although,

New Zealand is not actually spinach, it is a vigorous grower that can be trained on a trellis or allowed to spread over the garden bed.

The frost sensitive plant can be sown when it is also planting time for tomatoes and peppers.

Soak seeds overnight and sow spaced about ten inches apart in rows or plant in hills like squash.

Harvest the leaves individually as needed.

The leaves are small, thick, and filled with water.,/p>

Caring for Spinach Plants

The plants need light but even watering.

Spinach grows in a wide variety of soils but produces the best crops in enriched soil.

Grown in fertile soil, the crops generally do not require supplemental fertilizer.

Nitrogen applications should only be considered if the leaves are a pale green color.

An abundance of nitrogen can give spinach a metallic taste.

Harvesting Spinach

You can begin harvesting individual leaves as soon as they are large enough to use.

Cut the whole plant at soil level.

An option is to cut the entire spinach plant an inch above the soil line.

This technique encourages the plant to re-grow another leaf crop.

During warm weather, the plants bolt which means they form a central stem that quickly grows into a flower stalk.

When bolting takes place, harvest what you can and put the rest in the compost bin.

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Spinach Seeds to Vegetable Gardening

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