Freezing spinach

For spinach, you have the option of canning or freezing. You could probably dry it as well, but for us there was no question - freezing was likely to have the best texture and flavor. But you can't just rinse the leaves and shove them into the freezer - I'm not sure what would happen if you did that, but at the very least it would taste bad.

We rinsed the spinach leaves by dunking them in water, shaking them around, and then putting them in a colander. My spouse rinsed them before tearing off the parts he didn't want to preserve, while I removed the parts I didn't want before rinsing. I think either method is fine but my method meant having to change the water fewer times. Sometimes a clump of dirt or a little big would come off, which is a normal part of growing food. We just picked the parts we would want to eat if we were making a salad - we probably could've included more leaves, but I wanted this frozen spinach to be extra good! In the photo below you can see the bowl of spinach ready to be blanched.


Then, you blanch. This stops the growing process. We decided to use the steam blanching method rather than the immersion blanching method. For immersion blanching, you put the spinach in lightly boiling water for two minutes (precision is important when preserving food). For steam blanching, according to my resources, you just increase the time by 50% - so three minutes. We used a steamer pot and put a very thin layer of leaves in.


Then, you ice bath them. This stops the cooking process. This was kind of difficult - we didn't have enough ice on hand. But we did the best we could and I would just spoon the steamed spinach into the ice bath, swirl them around with my hand until they felt cooler than room temperature. Then we put them in a colander to drain.


Then, you remove the excess water. The more water you remove, the longer the spinach will keep in the freezer. My source recommended using a salad spinner, but we didn't have one so we did the best we could using a spoon to squeeze as much water out as possible. The following photo shows my spouse trying to squeeze as much excess water out as he could - even though we thought the spinach was well-drained, once it was in the bag we could see that there was a lot of water still hanging around.


Then, you put them in bags. We used quart-sized freezer bags and labelled the date, the vegetable, and any other information. For example, I wasn't sure if we were supposed to remove the stems or not so we did one with stems, one without. We're almost certain that you don't have to remove the stems, which is nice because doing so is time consuming. But, perhaps it will taste better.

We harvested enough for two quart-sized bags. In the future I will try to do more to get more water out, because I can tell there are a lot of ice crystals in the bags already. I don't think this will hurt the flavor as long as we use it relatively quickly - I'm guessing three months? I will say that we sampled some of the spinach and the quality - both taste and texture - was phenomenal when judged against the standard of supermarket frozen spinach. I'm excited to see how it holds up!

First harvest!

We had our first harvest tonight! I never thinned the spinach, so I finally did that tonight while also harvesting leaves from the plants that i left to grow. Harvest is one of my absolute favorite parts of gardening. I feel such a sense of accomplishment because even though the soil, seed, water, and sunlight really did all of the work, I had an integral role to play and it honestly makes me feel so confident. There's something about being able to grow your own food that just makes you feel like you are capable, like a pioneer surviving on the frontier.

As I've mentioned before, only one of the spinach varieties germinated, but we still got a good crop. We brought in two giant bowls full. The spinach was delicious and soon, I'll tell you how we preserved it!

First direct seedings!

We began our spring garden preparations in mid-April, and I expected to begin our first plantings of spinach, carrots, onions, and potatoes soon after. But I decided to strictly follow the soil temperature suggestions on the back of the seed packets, and use soil temperature maps (greencastonline.com/SoilTempMaps.aspx) to guide my planting timings. We had an unusually cool spring, so I did not plant my first seeds until early May! I sowed Olympia spinach from Territorial in one of the raised lasagna beds. A week later, I could see evidence of a very successful germination!!

I'm not sure how well that will show up for you, but I can see the line of embryonic spinach:) Here in the picture below, you should be able to see it better - about a week later, you can see several sets of true leaves!


Much like the celery, I enjoy thinning out the spinach because I like to eat the little baby spinach that I pull:) Both types of spinach I selected are hybrids, rather than open-pollinated. Although there were some open-pollinated varieties available, they were savoy types. I have only tried savoy spinach once, and I didn't like it at all. But I may be willing to give it another shot next year...

I have to be honest at this point and admit that I didn't do a good job keeping track of dates at all. At some point I planted the seed potatoes I bought from seeds of change. I chose two varieties: cranberry red (with pink flesh!) and german butterball. Again, because of the cold spring I did not end up planting the seeds potatoes until I'd had them for about a month. When I pulled them out of the box, I was disappointed to see that they looked wilted, wrinkly, soft, and were growing several eyes. I went ahead and planted them because they were expensive (seed potatoes were by far the highest priced items - from this company, I think I spent about 20 dollars for two varieties!) and I figured, you never know. Well, they are doing amazingly well! It turns out you are supposed to let them sprout before planting, and though I'm still not sure they were supposed to look so wrinkly and soft, I don't see any problems with the potatoes right now. Here is a photo of the potato plants after they'd been in the ground a few weeks. The ones on the left have a purple cast to the leaves - those are the cranberry red potatoes:)


For the potato bed, we tilled it, broke up deep sod with a pick-ax, then tilled it again. The soil was nice and soft when I went to plant the potatoes.

I guess the seed potatoes I got were excellent ones. They were about the size of golf balls, maybe a little larger, and because they were so small I didn't have to cut them before planting them. This is better because when you plant pieces, the exposed flesh is more prone to disease and insects.