Sowing the Spinach Seeds
My second harvest from my vegetable garden is spinach! I will be Popeye the Sailor Man!
I sowed the seeds at the end of March and seedlings popped out in a couple of weeks. In the beginning, the seedlings were flawless. Bright green, shaped like robust blades of grass and most important of all, flawless. Not a speck on their faces. Two weeks later, they were still looking good as their narrow blades evolved into ovate green leaves.
The Spinach Leaf Miner Attack
Hélas! Good things don’t come easy. The spinach leaf miner, a kind of fly, lays eggs on the leaves. The larvae from these eggs get between the layers of a leaf and feed on the chlorophyll, leaving the epidermis intact. The damage is manifestly visible in the opaque streaks or patches left behind on the leaves. It was really agonising having to pluck and get rid of each of these marred leaves.
To save my remaining spinach from more flies depositing their eggs, I bought some fine garden mesh netting and covered my whole row of spinach. There were still some leaf miners but the damage was much less.
My Spinach Harvest, Bolting and All
So, there I was, two months after I planted the first seeds, plucking the spinach leaves, most of which were still relatively small in size. However, the flowering process, or what’s also commonly called bolting, had already occurred. It’s commonly known that the spinach leaves tend to be bitter when bolting starts. I was thus greeted by a scatter of spinach flowers.
I selected the bigger leaves and managed to fill up half a salad bowl of leaves. The volume was deceptive. After my mother-in-law pan-fried the spinach with garlic and butter, the result was a side dish that was barely enough for one person! If I would like to have a proper meal with spinach, I had better enlarge my vegetable plot!
