Video:How to Grow Organic Spinach

Transcript:How to Grow Organic Spinach

Hi there everybody, this is Philip Anderson with Anderson Organics and we're a CSA-organic farm and today we're going to be doing a video for About.com on how to grow organic spinach.  

Choose Your Seed to Grow Organic Spinach

Step number one. You want to start with good quality organic seed. And if you're going to grow true organic spinach you need to start with organic seed, which is pretty widely available these days. If you're a home gardener and you're wanting to grow enough for your family, between 500 and 1,000 or a 1/4 an ounce to a 1/2 ounce should be plenty to get your started.  

Try Transplanting Seeds to Grow Organic Spinach

The second step is, you need to choose your planting method. There's two basic things you can do. You can either direct-seed your spinach or transplant it. If you're transplanting it, a 98-cell-sized tray is a good size. So you'll find a good organic soil potting mix and you'll fill up a couple cells or do the whole tray if you're gonna do enough for your garden. And then, after they're full you'll want to compact them down so they're nice and tight. Make a little divot in them, and then you're going to take your spinach seed and put one to two spinach seeds in each cell. And then, a great step is to cover it with a little vermiculite so it'll stay moist. You want to keep that moist and at about 40 to 60 degrees and in about seven days the spinach sees will start to pop up.  

Grow Organic Spinach Using Direct-Seed Method

Okay, so the second option would be to direct-seed your spinach right into the soil. So, you'll want to get the seed ready here. And then you can take a stick or a hoe and just make small furrow of about 20 to 30 feet long or however much you want to grow your spinach. And just put them in about one every  inch, one every two inches or so, and then you're gonna cover them over light with the soil. You don't want to burry these seeds deep because they're very, very small. And then in about seven to 10 days you should have some spinach coming up.  

Harvest Your Organic Spinach Crop

Okay, as soon as your spinach leaves get to about three inches, they're ready to harvest. That would be about anything about this size; and the best way to do that is simply to take your scissors and cut them off, like this, leaf by leaf. You can also allow them to get much bigger, if you want to use your spinach for cooking or you want to juice with it. I like to just take the whole spinach plant and cut the leaves right off. That way the spinach has an opportunity to re-grow, as long as you don't cut it down too close, leave a couple inches there. It will re-grow in about a week, even as little as four days.  

So for more information about organic gardening, be sure to check out About.com.