Spinach in March

It's only mid May and Cheryl picked yet another batch of fresh spinach. We've been eating spinach from the garden since early April, even before many gardeners had sown their spinach seeds. We did it by frost-seeding in late September. Being hardy, the spinach seedlings spent the winter beneath a constant cover of snow mulch and as soon as the snow melted in late March, the inch-tall seedlings shot up. We've been eating spinach ever since. Frost seeding is an old practice not very often mentioned in garden books now. It works in our area for not only spinach but also peas. Seeds treated with a fungicide are less apt to rot in the cold soil but the treatment is more of a life insurance and not absolutely necessary. Try it this year. —Dr. Bob Gough

TOO EARLY FOR TRANSPLANTS, TRY SPROUTS

It’s early May and around here we don’t plant outside until Memorial Day, and even then we know there’ll likely be a big wet snow the first week of June. But the days warm, the snow recedes, and you get anxious. You counsel patience, but want to do something productive. This year I tried sprouting seeds for the first time.

At last year’s Colorado Garden & Home Show we bought a pack called “5 Part Salad Mix Sprouting Seeds,” packaged by Handy Pantry Sprouting in Springville, Utah. Contents: organic alfalfa, radish, mung bean, lentil, and broccoli. Certified 100% organic, the label says, “This mixture creates denser, higher fiber salad.”

To grow them in, I ordered the Biosta Sprouting Kit from territorialseed.com. It consists of three light plastic trays, and a bottom receptacle; place your seeds in t h e three stacking trays, pour water into the top and it filters down through the others, eventually ending up in the bottom. Price is a hefty $40.95 for what it is, but it’s clever and works very well.

The “5 Part Salad Mix Sprouting Seeds” yields about 5 cups of sprouts. As with any sprouts, you gotta eat them within a few days or they get funky. I put them on salads, but also find other uses, like in a breakfast burrito with Eggbeaters, onions, maybe some potato cubes and cheddar cheese. From our long-ago sailing days, when everything on board sometimes got damp and soft, sprouts give you a nice crisp c-r-u-n-c-h.

You can buy online. The 4-ounce pack we bought at the show for $4.83, sells online for $3.42. Don’t ask me why, but I guess it was the vendor expanding her profit margin. Handy Pantry has lots of other products, including various sprouting seed mixes, and sprouting containers less expensive than the one we bought.

Living Whole Foods d.b.a. Handy Pantry Sprouting, 1041 North 450 West., Springville, UT 84663, tel. 800–735–0630, handypantry.com.