You would be hard-pressed to find someone who loves spinach salads more than I do. After years of focused devotion to spinach, I find it difficult to eat any other salad greens.  Every now and then I will eat romaine, but it is always a sloppy second to spinach (sorry Romaine lovers).

Fortunately, spinach is a great food to love. It is one of the few habits I have picked up that I can rejoice in and continue without apology. If only I could say that about all my habits.

In considering what to grow in my newly acquired vegetable plot this year, spinach seemed like a natural choice. I eat spinach multiple times a week and for the cost of a seed packet and minimal care I figured I could actually be purposeful in growing food that I would look forward to eating.  Not that growing my own food is my thing. At best, it is an exercise in exploration.

In the gardening plot my young grandson and I planted last year we had carrots, cucumbers and strawberries. This effort was wildly successful. We had more carrots and cucumbers than we knew what to do with. I had no idea how to estimate the output of a couple packs of seeds and a handful of strawberry plants.

My typical gardening efforts are focused exclusively on flowers – lots of them – in all shapes, sizes, and colors. If they stay alive and look pretty I deem my efforts a success. I find tremendous joy in flower gardening even though it is mostly a summer-long effort in weeding and deadheading.

The whole point of my foray into vegetable gardening was to spend time with my grandson (then three years old) and to teach him the magic of growing things he can eat. Alas, he loved harvesting the garden, but his interest in eating items from it stopped at the strawberries. So this year, I left my grandson’s garden to the strawberries and a couple of cucumber plants and put in a new large plot that I populated almost entirely with spinach.

I was so excited when I saw the first sprouts of spinach in early June. I was floored when I got home from back to back trips recently and saw a healthy crop of spinach developing. And I must say, I was a bit proud at my ability to produce with just a packet of seeds and little attention my own spinach garden.

Last week, I looked up online how to properly harvest spinach leaves without hampering future growth. I did not want to lose any ground on what had been successful to that point.  Unfortunately, I was waylaid from my spinach snipping mission by rain and then heat.  Yesterday evening, while doing my watering rounds, I noted that many of my spinach plants had seed stalks growing in them. Being the completely unskilled and uneducated spinach gardener I am, I had to do some investigative Googling to understand what was going on. I learned that my spinach was bolting. This means, for those of you who are unfamiliar with spinach growing lore, that the spinach plant is going to seed and the spinach leaves will start to taste bitter. I also learned that bolting happens when the days get longer and there is a stretch of hot weather. Apparently, spinach is best viewed as a late spring/early summer and late summer/early fall kind of crop for places like North Dakota. It probably said that on the seed packet, but I did not read the packet.

Hence, bolting became the operative word today for me in my rushed effort to enjoy at least some of the spinach from my garden. I started with cutting enough spinach for a healthy sized lunch salad.  That involved a significant amount of snipping. I never really counted how many spinach leaves I typically consume in such a lunch salad, but I know now that filling the bowl wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. Of course, after the cutting there must be repeated washing to rid the spinach of dirt and bugs and the like. The prospect of encountering a little extra bug protein in my salad pushed me to spend a lot of time on the washing.  It was a long process to get to lunch.

When it was all said and done, I had my salad. I had hoped that it would be spectacular as I have always heard about homegrown produce. It was not spectacular. It was okay – just okay.  Indeed, it was not as good as the organic baby spinach I typically buy at the grocery store.  I am not sure if that was a function of my failure as a grower, the effect of bolting, a bit of both, or something else all together.

I concluded from this experience that I should leave spinach growing to the experts. Sure, it may be less personally gratifying to buy a container of spinach than to grow it in the land I cultivated and nurtured, but I can live with that.  I do not feel a need to be, and do, all things within my realm of possibility.  I can accept that I am not meant to be a spinach grower. I am only a couple of miles from the grocery store and they have yet to run out of already snipped and washed baby spinach that tastes yummy.  That is where I will bolt to next time I need to fill my salad bowl. I am sure the entire process will be less time consuming and more successful than my singular spinach growing experience.

Another day in the new forty – obla di obla da

Ms. C