I'm Ron Patterson with Utah State University Extension in Carbon County.
Today we're going to plant some spinach.
Spinach is a wonderful, cool-season, leafy vegetable that you can plant early in the
spring - probably in April is a good time to get your spinach planted.
It doesn't do well in the hot part of the summer so if you want to have your spinach
up and harvested and so when July and August comes around here in our high desert Utah
country, that we don't get that going to...to seed and then lose the...the spinach in the
hot season.
And so we want to make sure we get it planted early, and we can do it like other leafy vegetables:
we can plant them in wide rows, so we can save a little bit of space in our garden that
way.
So here we'll show you how to plant some spinach.
Okay, to make your furrows, just take the corner of your hoe, drag it in your soil - like
that - we can do two or three of them together and make a nice, wide planting of our spinach.
It's important for us to make sure that we've got plenty of moisture in our soil...it's
been very dry this winter and spring...but in the high countries of Utah it's probably
a good...good practice to always wet your soil down, put some water down in that furrow
so that you get good moisture soil contact with your seed.
Now, a little planting like this will provide enough spinach for a normal family, so it
doesn't take a whole lot of space to do spinach in your garden.
You get them planted a little too thick, you can always thin out after they've germinated;
seedlings pop up you can always thin out your planting a little bit so that you can get
done.
You want your seedlings to be about...oh, two to four inches apart when you're growing
them during the season.
So now we'll let this water soak down and then we can spread some seeds through the
furrows.
Now that our water's soaked down, seed - the spinach seed is pretty hardy; it will push
up through the soil pretty good and - that's probably planted just a little thicker than
it needs to be - just put those seeds down there along that furrow.
And we'll probably end up having to thin these a little bit but that's okay.
Put about a quarter inch of soil over the top of them.
And in about a week to ten days we should have some spinach plants popping up; little
seedlings pop up and we'll be excited to have some spinach in our salads this year.
Pat those down so you get good soil contact.
Hopefully we won't get too windy this spring to where we need to have to water these again
before the soil - before the seeds come up but I expect the seedlings to pop up before
we have to water it again, and we got plenty of water down there; that should keep the
plant growing for...for a little while before we need to water it again.
So we'll show you how to do it in a wide row planting now.
Now to do it in a wide row, you're just going to make it a...a wide row and scatter the
seeds across it.
Just use the back of the rake, rake gives us a good measurement.
You can make the rows a little wider if you want to, but basically we're just going to
make...make us a wide row and scatter the seeds on there.
So...so we'll show you how that's done.
Okay, just use our rake, kind of pull out an area that we're going to be seeding, make
it look - make it as level as possible, that way we can soak the water down in and let
it soak down evenly across the whole bed.
Again, this size of a bed will...will treat a normal family in spinach until the summer
turns hot and then have a little bit more trouble with our spinach after that.
But it'll give us a good planting of spinach.
All right now just like with the furrows, we're going to have to wet this down because
we don't have a lot of moisture in our topsoil this year.
But we'd wet it down anyway so we'd get good soil moisture seed contact; you get good germination
that way.
So we'll fill this with about a half inch to an inch of water, let it soak down six
to twelve inches into the soil, and give us a good soil moisture content.
Let this soak down and then we'll scatter some seeds.
Okay, we've got the water soaked down pretty good; we're going to scatter the seed out.
The nice thing about spinach and radishes is you can actually plant these again in the
fall if you plant them...late - well, probably early August again, you'll get some nice radish
and spinach in the fall, and it does very well there.
Actually, I've found that there's fewer disease and insect problems - especially for the radishes
- if you do it in the fall.
So we'll scatter these out over that, and when they pop up we'll want to thin them down
two to four inches between the plants, but just kinda scatter that out in that bed.
Cover them with about a quarter inch of soil; firm it down, pat it down so that you've got
good soil seed contact.
And there we go: ready to have some more fun in our garden.