Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Spinach
If we were to grow only one leafy winter crop, it would be spinach. We sell spinach both as small leaves in the salad mixes
and as large leaves for bulk sales. In both cases we harvest only
whole leaves without stems. This is slower work than harvesting entire plants, but we continue to do it because it is worth
it: the regrowth is much better, which means greater total yield
per square foot, and the quality of the product is exceptional
enough to command a commensurate price. We harvest with
a very sharp small-bladed (birds-beak) knife and find we have
become very efficient with practice.
In our climate spinach planted outdoors during the second
to third week of September in well-composted soil and then
covered with a greenhouse by late October is ready to harvest
for Thanksgiving sales. The plants continue to produce, yielding four more harvests per bed until late March/early April. We
devote almost half of our total greenhouse space to winter spinach. For more on spinach, see pages 36 and 126.
Leeks
Leeks are almost a year-round crop for us and would be all-year if
the winter leeks did not sell out so quickly. We get our first crop
in May from transplanting extra early seedlings to a cold house.
(Seeds are sown February 15 in our plant-starting greenhouse.)
Then we sell outdoor-grown summer leeks through September
and the fall leeks through November. Winter leeks are available from early December until we are sold out, usually in early
March. We use a different leek variety for each season. The
summer and fall leeks are harvested directly from the field with
the additional protection of a sheet of plastic over the last of
the fall leeks during the second half of November. We protect
the winter leeks with a movable greenhouse starting in early
December. We add an inner layer from mid-December on until
all the leeks are sold.
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Winter Crops
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Mche
Mche continues growing right through the winter, no matter
how cold the weather. With mche you harvest and sell the
whole plants. We often included mche in the salad mix during
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