First Spinach Harvest For 2015

Today was the first spinach harvest of this year and I was able to collect a few spinach leaves that were ready for consumption.  Spinach leaves last quite a while as long as you leave them in the fridge or cool area.

I had a couple of plants that did not transplant well and ended up bolting rather early.  Sometimes this does happen, but with approximately twenty plants this is not so bad.  I still have plenty left that are producing large leaves and others that are continuing to produce.

The leaves were not too bad in terms of size, but I always like to have very large crinkling spinach leaves.  They are still great to place in salads and I can use them for a spinach and tomato sandwich.  Instead of using lettuce I use spinach.

I cut about three to four leaves from the healthiest plants that I had.  Most of them came from the first spinach transplants.  The others I will pick when they are ready.

Here are the plants before and after I picked the leaves.

After I harvested the spinach plants I placed a layer of manure around the plants as you can see from the photo below.

Since spinach are heavy feeders especially on nitrogen it is important to provide them with the necessary food to produce large and dark green leaves.

So far everything seems to be going pretty good and I have planted more seeds in the past week.  Some more melons, watermelons, peppers, cucumbers, cilantro, dill, and alyssum have been planted.

I also separated some of the tomato and squash plants as well.  I usually would just thin them out, but because of a low tomato and squash sprouting rate I decided to separate them instead of removing them from the soil.

Onions are doing pretty well in both the garden and totes and will probably start feeding them very soon as well since they require fertilizer as well.