I Remember Spinach

The Benefits/Disadvantages of Being A Lazy Gardener

It’s early autumn, the sun is shining, and the temperature is mild: an ideal time to walk through the garden, take stock of what worked and what didn’t, collect seeds, plant an experimental fall crop or two and make plans for the seasons ahead.

I love gardening, but I will admit, I’m sloppy and lazy. Most dedicated and seasoned gardeners adhere to a strict schedule. They start their seeds at the same time each year, in order to be able to plant them outdoors in carefully prepared beds, at precisely the optimal time for healthy growth.

My method is a bit more casual. Each year, I start my seeds indoors whenever I get around to it (depending on how tired I am of winter and how seriously affected by Spring Fever I am). Sometimes I start as early as February – sometimes as late as April. This past year, I started some broccoli seeds in late March. I don’t know what I was thinking except, “If they grow, they grow.” I wasn’t really looking into the future and wasn’t really planning on planting them outside at any specific time. As it turned out, it wasn’t until late June/early July before I got around to transplanting the small, leggy and anemic seedlings outside in the garden. I didn’t think they would make it, and even considered putting them right into the compost pile, but somehow they persevered and stuck it out through a pretty rough season.

Luckily, my neighbors generously donated some of their extra broccoli seedlings, and since theirs were a lot larger and healthier than mine, they didn’t seem to mind sitting around for a couple of weeks waiting to be planted, and now, I’m happy to report, they are doing fine. Of course, it took the entire season for them to catch up and while more prudent gardeners were enjoying their broccoli, mine was still struggling for survival. Now that summer is over, they have just started to produce. My seed-started broccoli is a few weeks behind the (late) broccoli my neighbors supplied. I wasn’t sure mine would make it to the end of the season, but, incredibly, they are still going and will probably be ready for picking in the next few weeks.

So, what I have ended up doing, unwittingly, is to extend the season and while most are cleaning out their gardens and throwing their spent broccoli plants into the compost, I’m getting ready to pick and enjoy the florets just being produced -- all this, with no effort on my part at all. I didn’t work or fortify the soil, in fact, the soil is pretty hard and clay-like. I didn’t mulch around the plants. I didn’t pick off the cabbage loopers and I didn’t water the plants at all -- even when we went weeks without significant rainfall. I just sat back and waited and watched.

Another thing that happened while I fiddled and frolicked this summer, was that I totally neglected the early crop of swiss chard I grew. I let a couple of the plants go to seed, (these actually happened to be plants that overwintered in my garden), wondering if the seeds would be viable, and now, much to my surprise, I have a whole patch of baby swiss chard that will be ready for picking, most likely, by mid-fall. Sweet.

And I’ll not forget the radishes – I planted some seeds two seasons ago and have found that this plant loves to reproduce. I also left a couple of radishes in over winter just to see what would happen and found that I didn’t have to plant any seeds at all this year. A whole patch of radishes grew from the seeds (some still attached to the original radish plants,) and subsequently self-sowed themselves yet again -- awesome (if you like radishes.)

So, for this season’s fall crop, I am once again a bit late, and actually wasn’t even planning a fall crop until I was prompted by my neighbors. They remembered me, once again, and graciously donated some of the seeds that their arugala plants had just produced. I scattered them haphazardly September 1st, in a small patch where I had just dug up some potatoes, and much to my surprise, they sprouted within a couple of days. They are now doing fine and ready to be picked as baby greens.

Two things I did get an early start on last season were spinach and lettuce. I made my own baby greens mix which consisted of Oakleaf and Buttercrunch lettuce and Melody spinach. I fashioned a simple, small, cold frame out of an old shelving unit and some plastic wrap that kept the crop warm and moist. I was enjoying my baby greens as early as early May. Unfortunately, I let them bolt and didn’t think about them again, at all, until the first recent E.coli situation with spinach came about. If I had been on the ball, I would have planted a successive crop that would be ready right about now.

If I can’t confidently buy spinach in my local supermarket (the last time I tried was a few days before the recalls, and I have to admit, none of it looked very appealing to me), I’d much rather grow it, myself. Something about bagged greens just seems wrong, anyway, and how many times over the past few years has the FDA issued warnings about bagged salad? So much so that a special lettuce safety initiative was set up.

According to the FDA’s website: “The FDA developed the Lettuce Safety Initiative www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/lettsafe.html in response to recurring outbreaks of E. coli O157:H7 in lettuce. As a result of this recent outbreak, the initiative has been expanded to cover spinach.
Foodborne illnesses happen more frequently than I feel comfortable with, I’ll tell you. Even if the greens are washed thoroughly and contaminant free when they leave the processing plant, when you consider the distances they have to travel and the length of time they sit around, it’s no wonder they look wilted and damaged by the time they reach local grocery stores. Even the organic mesclun mixes available are less than attractive to me now, especially since I have found how easy it is to grow my own salad greens.

Getting back on the gardening ball, I decided to plant a fall crop of Buttercrunch lettuce and Melody spinach. Baby spinach is delicious and can be picked and eaten as early as leaves begin to form. This batch just might be ready before the first frost hits, and with the recent shortage of spinach, it will certainly be a welcome salad green around here.

There’s a wide variety of salad greens that can be grown together to make your own personalized mix and they can even be grown in pots that can be taken indoors or covered when the temperature drops too low.

Certain greens like spinach and chard are not at all bothered by a light frost and actually do better in the crisp, cool, fall weather -- as opposed to the warmer spring and summer weather -- so this fall crop just might have a chance and I just might be enjoying fresh spinach again soon. If not, I suppose, there’s always next year!