Spinach

A customer at market once told me that our spinach ruined her for store spinach.  After a winter spend being pregnant and craving greens, I get it.  Our spinach is nothing like store spinach.  Commercial spinach tends to be baby leaves, which don’t have the same flavour or nutritional content as a mature leaf.  All that traveling that the store spinach does before reaching your plate certainly doesn’t do anything for it’s freshness or flavour.  By no means am I intending to knock grocery store produce: in fact, it’s impressive that we can now buy nearly every item year-round and have the quality be somewhat standard.  However, “impressive” does not imply “right”.  It’s our consumer demand that makes farmers grow and ship crops all over the world, and a side effect is that the flavour suffers.  We’re all about flavour here at the farm, and so generally I just avoid spinach when it’s not fresh and locally grown.

Spinach is a labour intensive crop to grow and harvest, as the crop needs to be weed-free for ease of harvesting quickly, and each leaf is hand-picked by us farmers.  We encourage our newer farmers to learn how to pinch leaves off and move them into the palm of their hands so that big handfuls go into the bucket instead of a couple leaves at a times.  Efficiency is so, so, SO important at the farm.  The time wasted when your hand travels from the row of spinach to the bucket adds up and can make the difference between us making a profit or having a loss.  I (Teri) am a self-professed efficiency nerd, and love examining ways that we can improve our production.

Season: Spinach loves the cool spring and fall temperatures and grows best in those seasons.  We grow some all summer but find it is most in demand in the spring.

Storage Tips: Your spinach has been rinsed at the farm, but should be washed at home just before you eat it. Keep it in the bag it comes in in the fridge — if you find there is a lot of condensation in the bag it helps to add a towel to absorb any excess moisture, and to poke a couple holes in the bag. It will last for a week or two, possibly longer, but as with everything eat it as soon as possible for maximum health benefits!  We’ve had spinach last for months in the fridge.

Preparation Tips: You can saute spinach (it’s great with fresh garlic or garlic scapes), it’s great in omelettes or fritattas, you can eat it in a salad, if you’re really ambitious you can make spanakopita or saag paneer.

Try our Spinach Salad with Strawberries from Aunty Jayne recipe. She was telling me about how much she and Uncle Calvin enjoy this salad last week. The dressing is also great on the salad mix or lettuce, and there’s twice as much dressing in this recipe as you need for a 1/2 lb of spinach so there will be some leftover! Jayne is Mom’s sister and she’s part of the farm team: she helps when we are behind on weeding (always) and especially with making pickles in canning season. She also contributes by preserving extra produce for Mom and I because we are too busy to get it done in the growing season, and those bags of frozen peas, beans, corn, etc are so welcome in the winter!