Park Seed Garden Journal

Ooops, Nadia!  Apparently when we sent out the email link to introduce our blog with our spinach topic, we failed to include our blog on lettuce where we showed a cold frame and offered a little more info on how to grow cool-season greens.  So, I’ll post more here on the steps to take in growing your own spinach and in using a cold frame to extend your spinach (and other greens!) harvest into the winter months.  My thanks to all the folks who emailed their questions and comments to me at anita.dover@gmail.com. I hope this new info is helpful to everyone. 

When?
The absolute best time to grow spinach depends upon where you live.  For those in Northern climates, early spring is the best time to sow spinach, but folks in warmer areas can grow it in early spring or in fall for a winter harvest.  Spinach is a cool-weather crop, but if your crop lingers on after the weather grows hot, you can try shading it with shade cloth to get just a little more out of the harvest before summer kicks in.

If you’re unsure of how to tell what time is best for your Zone/area, consult your local county extension agency for the best dates to sow crops according to where you live.  Each state has a Land Grant Agricultural University that provides detailed information on plants, gardening, landscaping, insect control, etc.  These Universities also publish booklets and provide online information for all types of gardening and plants. A list of local extensions can be found (click here) at the following web address: www.csrees.usda.gov/Extension/index.

Where?
Spinach does best when grown in full sun, but will tolerate partial shade.  Plant in well-drained, fertile soil with lots of organic matter mixed in, with as close to neutral pH as possible.  If you’re starting in spring, prepare your soil this fall because late winter weather can make a mucky mess out of digging.  Mix in a few inches of compost or well-aged manure to a depth of 8 to 10 inches and remove any rocks or large clumps in the process.

How?
Sow seed ½ inch deep in rows 12 to 18 inches apart. Space seeds about 1 inch apart to begin with, but once seedlings reach an inch tall, thin them to 4 to 5 inches apart – remember, you can save the thinned seedlings for salads, too!  Keep moist until germination occurs.  Germination usually takes 8 to 10 days, but when sowing a late summer or fall crop, germination can be hastened by placing seeds in the refrigerator for 1 week prior to sowing. 

In spring, sow successive plantings about a week apart until 6 weeks before daytime temperatures are above 75 degrees F to ensure a constant supply of spinach.  Start sowing again in late summer for a fall and winter crop – spinach may stop growing once freezing weather arrives, but it will overwinter in warmer areas and start growing again in early spring. 

Maintenance?
Spinach has shallow roots and requires ample, consistent moisture to perform its best.  If you’ve prepared your soil with good compost or aged manure, it shouldn’t require much fertilization throughout the season, but you can apply an all-purpose fertilizer (according to package directions) if the normally dark green leaves start to yellow.  An inch-thick top-dressing of compost or mulch helps to keep roots cool and moist and discourages weeds. 

Harvesting?
Once the plant has at least four to six true leaves, you can start picking young outer leaves as needed for fresh use, but cut entire plant off at soil level when leaves are 6 to 8 inches long and before the flower stalk forms.  Each variety has a different maturation rate, anywhere from 30 to 50 days. 

Other pointers:

• Different spinach varieties can be more cold-tolerant, heat-tolerant, fast maturing, etc.  Choose the right variety based upon where you live and the growing conditions of your garden.
• Spinach leaves can either be smooth or crinkled (savoyed).
• Pick young leaves for fresh salads and use older, larger leaves for cooking – stir-fries, sautéing, casseroles, soups, stews, etc.

For those in warmer climates that don’t ever really get a “cool” season – Hello Southern Florida! – or those that want to grow spinach throughout summer, try ornamental but edible Malabar Spinach.  It’s not technically “spinach,” but its leafy greens are just as good, if not milder, than traditional spinach.  Another alternative is to grow it in a windowsill pot indoors, which is also an ideal way to grow lettuce!

More on Park Seed’s SeedHouse Portable Coldframe

If you’d like to try growing spinach this fall and into the winter, a cold frame will help keep temperatures above freezing, shelter tender plants from wind and rain, and extend the active growing period.  Basically, a cold frame is a structure with four sides and a hinged, transparent top, usually made out of glass or plastic, that you can open and close depending upon the outside temperatures.  They’re used during cold weather as a mini-greenhouse of sorts to either start plants earlier or extend a cold-hardy harvest into the winter months.  Park Seed offers one that’s extremely practical because it’s portable.  Most times gardeners throw together whatever old glass window or scrap lumber they can find to make a cold frame – kudos to us for being so recycling-minded!  But for those of us who are all thumbs or are short on time and space, it’s great to have one that’s lightweight and can be folded up for easy storage when not in use.  For a clear and concise definition of a cold frame (sorry – I tend to ramble), click here or go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_frame.

Swimming in Spinach – yippee!

Anita

anita.dover@gmail.com

Outdoors is the perfect place for a Halloween party — except for all of the gorgeous flowers and pretty plants everywhere that are way too cheerful and not scary enough. October 31st is supposed to be spooky and enchanting. Hosting your costume party in the cozy, relaxing garden you’ve worked so hard to create may not be the best way to bring out the ghosts and goblins. Unless…you travel to the dark side of the garden.  WOOOHAAAHAAAAAHAAAA!

Your ghastly garden doesn’t have to go completely goth to create an intriguing ambiance for Halloween. There are several night-blooming plants that reflect moonlight and give off a soft glow in the  garden. The glow will allow you to use natural light, which can create mysterious shadows, making your guests imagine spooky things that aren’t really there…or are they??!!  Hardy Fern Ghost illuminates the darkness with wraithlike fronds of silvery-gray, sneaking up on you as you turn each shadowy corner. 

Dark foliage and flowering plants can really play off of the moonlight and add Halloween colors to your design. The Black Four Leaf Clover 

boasts a beautiful deep purple-black foliage while sporting white blooms in the summer.            Coneflower Green Wizard will create chatter for its unique colors and double as cut flowers for Halloween bouquets or wreaths. 

There isn’t a better way to represent Halloween than with the master of horror movies — Bela Lugosi. He probably won’t actually come to your party – if he does, you’ll have a much more horrifying party than you bargained for – but you can plant his Daylily namesake. Bela Lugosi Daylily is almost black with a bright, lime green center that stares out like a glowing eye!

Park’s Black Jack is another dark beauty. This Bearded Iris has a ruffled midnight, violet bloom. Black Jack is so pretty, but reminds me of pirates for some reason!?

Dark foliage and night-blooming plants can definitely add Halloween mystique to your garden, but a true Halloween garden wouldn’t be complete without a few pumpkins. Ordinary pumpkins are fine to use, but with all the dark foliage and awkward entities, why not add unusual pumpkins?! I found a very interesting pumpkin, the Pumpkin Jarradale. The shell is a grayish-green color. Imagine the moonlight off this creepy little thing. As creepy as Jarradale looks, it is actually quite tasty. The flesh of this Australian stringless variety is super sweet and great for baking. It looks a little like a ghost pumpkin. Speaking of ghostly pumpkins…

The Pumpkin Baby Boo is a pure white miniature pumpkin. Baby Boo would make a great centerpiece for an outdoor table or maybe just plopped next to the Jarradale. For a more traditional pumpkin approach, try the Pumpkin Big Moon. I meant traditional by color! This pumpkin is HUGE. Big Moon has the ability to reach 150 pounds (remove all fruit except one from vine to grow this big). Carving would be a lot easier and imagine all the insides that you could use for cooking. If these pumpkins aren’t what you’re looking for, click here.

Help your vampire, witch, werewolf, and ghostly guests feel comfortable on Halloween – keep ‘em in your goth garden!  Beware:  Bats are attracted to plants that bloom at night. Their fragrance lures other nectar feeding insects that bats prey upon. Witch reminds me, don’t worry about citronella candles for your outdoor soiree, bats can consume up to 600 mosquitoes per hour!!

Happy Hauntings,

Nadia

nvanderhall@gmail.com

Well, yes ma’am, it sure can be grown just as safely and easily as lettuce!  For the most part, Spinach is actually more cold hardy than lettuce and can be grown just as easily throughout the winter in a cold frame or under row covers in most areas of the country. As with lettuce, if the temperature drops so low that the crop ceases its active growth, it will simply rest until warmer temperatures kick-start it again in spring.  You can also pick young leaves as you need them and the plant will keep on growing and producing more leaves. 

With all the bad press lately about the safety of bagged fresh spinach, this might be just the time to try your hand at growing fresh greens of your own.  Think about how bagged greens have changed the way you see salads.  It’s such a cinch to just open a bag and have instant salad.  But what if you grew your own? 

Spinach Melody Hybrid

More work, you say?  Yeah, but you’d have a ready supply of greens, you’d know their history (whether chemicals had been used, etc.), you’d be able to grow the exact variety you prefer, and you’d have the joy of knowing that you’re eating something that was lovingly cultivated by your own hand.   I can’t tell you how great a feeling it is to come home after a long day at work, decide that you’d rather not cook, and be able to walk out to your garden and pick the most delightful – and healthy – dinner.  The worst thing that could come of the recent fiasco is that people shy away from spinach.  Popeye didn’t munch can after can of it for no reason – it’s an excellent source of vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, iron, fiber, and protein and it’s naturally low in calories, too!

Any of the varieties we offer will overwinter well in a cold frame.  Nadia, I think your buddy in the garden shop has even told me that local farmers say Renegade is the best variety they’ve grown.  It matures much earlier than others do – in just 30 days, but you can pick young leaves even earlier – it’s very resistant to mildew, and is adaptable to a wide range of soils and growing conditions. We even offer Organic Renegade seed if you really want to keep close watch on where your food is coming from and what happens to it before it gets to your plate.                                                                                 

                                                                                                    Spinach Renegade Hybrid

I’m sure any variety you choose will go great in that infamous spinach dip you make.  I know your recipe calls for the frozen spinach, but why go frozen when you can go fresh!  If you get bitten by the greens bug, you might want to check out some others Park Seed offers such as Beets, Mustard, Kale, Radicchio, Swiss Chard, and Turnips.  Any of these will do well in cooler weather and produce the most tender young greens your taste buds have ever encountered. 

So, get started on your own baby greens, Nadia!  And bring me some of that spinach dip!  I like mine with the bagel chips, please!

See you in the spinach patch,

Anita

anita.dover@gmail.com

Anita-

Wonderful. I can still eat a salad and feel safe by using homegrown lettuce! What about spinach — can it be grown as safe and easy? Time to ditch the plastic bag full of mixed greens and pick fresh from the yard. Glad to know a novice can grow edible food as good (if not better)as a mass producer.

Evading E.coli-

Nadia

nvanderhall@gmail.com

Fall has crept up on me FAST!  I’ve had zero time to even think about what kinds of fall vegetable crops I’d like to grow, much less get up enough momentum to do anything about it. So, as much as I’m despondent about the fact that I didn’t get any seeds started earlier, I did think of one fall crop that most of us can still enjoy from seed – lettuce. Perk up your ears, Nadia, because this project is easy enough for up-and-coming green-thumbers, too!

Park Seed’s leaf-type lettuce (as opposed to lettuce that forms a head) is one of the quickest growing cold-tolerant vegetables you can start from seed, typically maturing in only 45 to 60 days. Leaf-type lettuces are also better suited when you’re short on time because you can harvest them in a cut-and-come-again manner. Once the baby lettuce reaches a few inches tall, you can begin shearing them down to just above the crown, and they’ll pop back with new growth for many harvests of delectably tender salad greens. Some varieties produce harvest-size leaves in as little as 3 to 4 weeks!  One of the best we have at Park Seed is Majesty (see right), a reliable loose-leaf variety with ruffled dark maroon leaves that’s as attractive in the garden as it is on your plate.

Some other varieties you might want to try are:

  Royal Oak Leaf

   Simpson Elite

         Green Ice

Although it is fairly late to start lettuce from seed and expect it to reach maturity before a hard freeze happens in most areas of the country, there are a few tricks you can use to extend your salad harvest into the winter months.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nadia – I know you’ve been searching for easy houseplants for gifts lately, and I’ve got just the thing for you!  This year at Park Seed we are offering South African Amaryllis (actually in South American native genus Hippeastrum) which boast some of the biggest flowers seen in the plant world. They have large sword-like foliage and thick, strong stems (usually two) topped with up to six lily-like blooms at a whopping 6- to 10-inches in size.  They come in an array of bold colors – pink, scarlet, salmon, red, white, and violet with lighter or darker throats, and six banded, solid, striped, or bordered petals.  They’re stunning window pot plants or houseplants and are remarkably easy to grow.  We even have some Amaryllis that might match your new dining room’s copper walls…maybe!  Here’s a few you might want to check out – we have miniatures available, too!

      Candy Floss           Baby Doll            Stars and Stripes

Park’s South African hybrids differ from Dutch Amaryllis in that they are bred for quicker flowering times, more blooms per plant, and new and unusual colors and forms.  They also produce leaves along with the stems, whereas the Dutch forms produce their flower stem before the leaves appear.  Since South African hybrids are grown to bloom on their normal cycle (summer in Southern hemisphere is actually winter in Northern hemisphere), blooms appear in just 4 to 6 weeks from planting time!  So if you start them in mid-November, you’ll have a bold centerpiece just in time for your holiday party, but if you’d like to have them in bloom for Thanksgiving, just start them mid-October.

If you aren’t ready to plant when you receive them, store bulbs at 45 to 50 degrees F with good ventilation to keep them from sprouting prematurely.  When you’re ready to plant, use a well-drained, sterile soil with a neutral pH and add a tablespoon of bone meal to encourage root development. In a pot slightly bigger than the bulb (about 1 to 2 inches larger in diameter), plant the bulb with one-half to one-third of its top above the soil with its “shoulders” just above the surface.  Pack the soil around the bulb so it’s secure once the stalk starts blooming and making the whole thing top heavy, especially since the roots will be barely established and 1/2 to 1/3 of the bulb is above the soil line. 

Water thoroughly after potting and keep soil only slightly moist until growth begins, then water more often – once a week should do the trick.  As with most bulbs, good drainage is essential – make sure your pot has drainage holes or line the bottom with pebbles to increase drainage. Once the bloom bud shows above the top of the bulb, you can start to fertilize every seven to ten days with a liquid fertilizer, but be careful to cease fertilization when the plant is not actively growing because doing so can inhibit root formation.  A good rule of thumb is to fertilize only when the plant has leaves or stems present. An Amaryllis needs four hours of direct sun per day to produce the best flowering, so place it in your sunniest windowsill to keep it happy.  Amaryllis thrive in normal indoor temperatures, but remember that higher temperatures speed up flowering, while cool temperatures prolong flowering. Turn the pot occasionally (1/2 or 1/4 turn every couple of days) when the bloom stalk is elongating to keep a straight stalk as it has a tendency to bend toward the light.

After flowering, cut the flower stalk off to 2 inches above bulb, but continue watering and feeding for the next 8 to 9 months.  When foliage turns fully brown, remove any remaining leaves and place the bulb in a dry, dark location, reduce watering, and let it go almost dry for two to three months or until a new bud begins to emerge.  If repotting the bulb, lift entire bulb and root ball, soil and all, and add fresh soil on bottom of pot, allowing bulb to set at the same level, and add fresh soil around the sides and top.  Water thoroughly, place in cool, dark location, and grow almost dry until flower bud is up 6 inches or more.  Repeat as above.

Do not repot until the bulb becomes root bound because Amaryllis would rather grow roots than flowers.  To produce the best flowering, keep bulb tightly pot bound.  People who live in Zones 8 to 11 can also try growing Amaryllis year-round outdoors in part shade, but those of us in Zone 7 can get by with this only if we have a mild winter. Anywhere else, they will need to be grown outdoors in containers or dug for winter storage.  Dig in late summer when foliage begins to die, remove soil, and store in cool, dry area.  Allow bulbs to rest 2-3 months, then repot and grow indoors for winter bloom or store until spring for outside planting.  If you do have the luxury of leaving them outdoors, expect them to multiply and produce giant clumps with hundreds of flowers!  Click HERE to see all of Park Seed’s South African Amaryllis and pick your favorite!

See you in the garden,

Anita

anita.dover@gmail.com

I have been helping out in the Garden Center to learn more about plants (it’s a way for me to learn without going back to school!). The most valuable thing that I have learned is that I will not become a master gardener or plant expert overnight! I am becoming more familiar with plants, their names, and the unspoken rules of gardening. Interesting journey thus far. I am working with a very talented gardener who teaches me new things every time I am in the Garden Center. I heard her telling a customer a tip on how to keep ants out of her house during winter — or just out period!

MINT — plant mint around your house. Apparently, ants do not like the scent of mint. You can completely surround your house with mint or just plant in places where there is more moisture than others. This is an attractive, natural, and fragrant way to keep the ants in their hills instead of your home.

Park Seed’s Spearmint

Like ants, mint multiplies. If you don’t want your home or yard overtaken, it is important to contain the mint you have planted. One way of doing this is by planting in containers. Mobility makes containers easier to work with and allows you to redecorate every now and then. A container with mint would also be convenient on a patio near a door, where ants may try to sneak through the cracks.  For planting in the ground, use chicken wire or edging to contain the mint.                                          

Park Seed’s Peppermint

There are several types of mint offered. My pal in the Garden Center said Spearmint and Peppermint work (because she has used them), but any type should work (i.e. Chocolate Mint, Catmint, Pennyroyal). Growing mint has benefits besides keeping the ants out. You can always clip a few sprigs and use them to make Mint Juleps, mint tea, and there are over 1400 mint recipes. Or, if your not into cooking, just use clippings around the house for a natural, fresh fragrance.

*FYI* The scent of Peppermint is said to relieve stress and give a quick pick-me-up when feeling blue.

Other mint-scents offered at Park Seed                         

Marveled by  Mint,                                              

                                                                  Nadia    

                                                                  nvanderhall@gmail.com            

Sorry Anita, I’ve been swamped since I missed work for a few days for the GWA Symposium in Valley Forge, PA (which was wonderful and I’ll brag about being able to go later). I’ll just go over some of the things in Park’s seed room.
We have two rooms where all of the seed action is:  the seed storage room and the packaging room. Our seed isn’t harvested on the Park Seed campus, so we take the seed from bulk and put it into our "Park’s Pak." To make sure the seeds don’t germinate, we control the temperature (about 60) and humidity (22.5%). Needless to say, it feels great in the seed area, cool and dry. Of course there are sassy seeds that require more attention. Those are kept in a special cooler where the temperature is even colder.

The packaging room is a little more exciting. Machines run to pack the seed varying in abilities to work alone and with an operator. Some machines just need a Park Seed employee to set the scales and pour seed into the top. The machine does the rest, weighs the seed, pours the seed into the Park Pak, seals the pack, and labels the pack. Others, however, require full attention from the operator. There is one machine where the operator has to work in sync with the machine, scooping seed into the pack. This is for smaller seeds, which are put into wax paper and then the Park’s Pak.

We do have a lot of quality control measures here at Park Seed. Seed packs will be opened at random and counted to make sure our customers are receiving the right amount of seed, if not a little more. This task is by far more than my nerves could ever take. Have you ever seen one of the employees counting those tiny little seeds? Anyway, another quality control measure that is taken is we test every seed variety (one seed of each variety) that enters the building 3 times a year in the germination lab. That is quality control if you consider the fact that we have over 1100 different varieties.

Hope this helps. And next time, take notes during your tour!

Delighted to share my knowledge,

Nadia

nvanderhall@gmail.com