To any and all Spinach growers. Feel free to post any and all informations, thoughts, photos etc. regarding the GTS spinach blend grow and any additional spinach grows you are working with in 2025. I planted my first spinach beds just this past week out this way in my wacky mountain climate.
I am trialing spinach from Turkey, China, Georgia (the country), and Hungary alongside my ongoing ‘Only Rain’ (no additional water) year two grow. All under the supervision of my goats - who, sadly, are not allowed to participate but make fantastic observers.
This spring it has proven chaotic due to storm damage and other issues facing our family farm. I had originally planned to direct sow the spinach but instead I am starting half of the seeds in an outdoor covered container made from a 3 gallon cooking oil jug. There are small quantities of purple orach and strawberry spinach together.
Here in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, I have had the seeds in the planter for about five days with no germination yet from any of these three. It’s been in the 70° range several times so I expect germination soon.
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Best of luck with your grow and I pray the weathers calm down and bring you more ease in the weeks and months ahead. Thanks for sharing!
Spinach slowly moving along. Interestingly, the Japanese spinaches a brother-in-law sent me and the Baker Creek seeds are clear early fast growers. I will likely plant two more half beds in the next two weeks as I just got new seeds from the EFN satellite nursery and store in Minneapolis just last week during a stopover.
In the past year I have added the following cultivar seeds into the original 5-7 known cultivar grex:
-‘Maznolisten’
-‘Giant Noble’
-‘Monnopa’
-‘Merlo Nero’
-Matador’
-‘Jiromaru’
-‘Monstrueux De Viroflay’
And this season I am trialing four GRIN Accessions to (gods willing) save seeds separately (early
seedlings in tagged rows below).
All spinach seeds are direct sown on farm:
SO, I have grown several pink veined french varieties in my ongoing ever evolving grex over the years but I have never grown a hybrid F1 like ‘Rubino’. This is very much the first expression I have grown that appears to be a cross of a Bloomsdale type (leaves) that has developed deep rose magenta veins. Pretty neat and fairly perdy at this young stage. These seeds in this portion of my beds come
from my ‘No Rain’ group of seeds from 2024:
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I direct sowed GTS spinach in a row with some Giant Winter from a local seed company. So far germination for the purchased seed appears to be significantly better. No big deal for me, just an observation.
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Yeah I am seeing mixed germination in total. It’s a strange year here - which is interesting because my Spinach seeds are typically absurdly vigorous.
Really good germination of my GTS grex in certain beds and or areas. Extremely sparse in other areas. Reallllly good germination in my Japanese spinaches. Really poor germination in my ‘No Rain’ mix from last season’s seeds. My GRIN seeds germinated fairly decently. We have a farmer in Vashon whose seeds had really poor germination of the GRIN seeds.
Examples:
Japanese Spinaches:
No Rain Trials - Uber Sparse
GTS Grex(es):
GTS Self Sown (w lettuces that sowed themselves amongst strawberries):
I’ll do a germination test this Fall though to see how the seed bank as a whole is performing. Thanks for the fedback!
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Planted the GTS 2025 seeds plus a few Butterflay, Giant Noble, and Bloomsdale back in early March here in zone 6a. Took them about a month to truly start growing, but I’ve got a couple dozen doing well now. I have done basically nothing for them except water a few times while they germinated. Two of them are already bolting (see picture), which seems pretty early here (it’s been mostly in the 40s and 50s for the last couple weeks), but I’m guessing those two will mostly self-select out since there won’t be much overlap with the others’ bolting. Looking forward to what happens next year!
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My germination rate was low and the seedlings didn’t grow very vigorously. I planted them out in the garden about a week ago intermixed with lettuce. They have not done well.
I expect that my issues are mostly grower related. I have had challenges getting started with the amaranth family despite the personal affinity I feel for these crops.
I do have some more of the GTS spinach mix saved. I will continue to try and learn.
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It could also have very much to do with the vast majority of the spinach I grow (granted we had some contributions this year! Yay!) is overwintered and direct sown in the Fall. I do sow in spring too but my experiences are even up here (in a cool spring as well) they are almost auto-flowering in late May. My earliest spinaches are also going to flower now as well. I do have a couple more beds just rearing their heads. I plant late annually as a test.
Part of the ‘fun’ of growing these are trying to find those anomalies. To date, I have yet to find a proclaimed ‘slow bolting’ spinach to ever show me that. I am halpy to have it be some of ly earliest spring greens.
These beds I share above, for example,
self sowed last Fall and germinated in December (!!) then held firm throughout repeated temps below zero
for over a month and repeated snows and ice. Spinach is ridiculously hardy:
Here they are today just going to flower-ish. I’ve lopped heads on a couple occasions and browse it like a deer en route to other gardens:
In other words, these seeds may be uber adapted to my winter and earliest spring plantings. Bolting would not surprise me in the least but selecting amongst that will still add deeper resilience to the pool of seeds. Thanks for sharing! I’m most impressed with the Japanese genetics I planted this season. Ridiculously mammoth plants. I’m looking forward to back mixing those into next season’s seed crop.
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