Last year I tried climbing spinach for the first time. It flourished in the heat of summer and I was pleased to have more than I could harvest. I grew it on my fence around me pool. Just an idea for summer tolerant variety.

In an ideal world, you'd plant your cool season seeds at the start of the cool growing season so you could harvest them during the cool season, or at least early in the warm season, for maximum quality and flavor. For spinach, that would mean sowing spinach seeds about 6 weeks before your daytime high temperatures start exceeding 75 degrees on a regular basis. However, with our Oklahoma weather being so extremely erratic in nature, particularly at this time of the year, that is easier said than done, so we all just try to do the best we can with whatever weather conditions we get in a given year.

With the spinach, if you sow the seeds now, you can start harvesting baby leaves as soon as they are large enough to cut. Just gently cut the outer leaves off the plant as you harvest so that more inner leaves keep developing. I'd harvest it and use it all along as baby spinach instead of waiting for the leaves to get extremely big. That will give you a larger harvest overall than if you were waiting for fairly mature spinach plants. The problem with waiting for it to mature is that we might get hot early and the crop might bolt. As a case in point, it hit 88 degrees at my house yesterday afternoon and not much of anything in the garden was happy with that 88 degrees this early in the year. One hot day won't make a cool-season crop bolt, but if we start stringing together a lot of hot days this early in the year, then some of the cool-season crops likely will bolt early.

On the bright side, spinach planted in the soil temperatures now common in Oklahoma ought to sprout fairly quickly. The ideal soil temperature for spinach seed to germinate is around 50 degrees. Most soil temperatures in OK now are closer to 60 degrees or higher. Your spinach seed should germinate in about a week at 60 degrees, but it is likely that a lower percentage of the seed will germinate at 60 than what would have germinated at 50. The warmer the soil gets from this point forward, the fewer the spinach seeds that will germinate, so if you are going to go ahead and plant the spinach, do it soon and try to keep the soil moist but not sopping wet. The cold front that's moving across the state today will help drop soil temperatures and air temperatures and that will help your spinach seed a bit.

Lettuce won't be affected quite as much by the warming soil temperatures as it will germinate fairly well in soil temperatures ranging from the 30s to the 80s. In your case, you should get fast lettuce seed germination at the soil temperatures we have now, but your lettuce then will be growing in fairly warm temperatures its entire life so you would get better results from planting it this late if you can place it somewhere in your garden where it will get afternoon shade. That will help keep it cooler and make it less likely to bolt. I often sow lettuce seed beneath my tomato plants where they serve as a living ground cover/mulch. I harvest using the cut-and-come-again method and once we are getting really hot (May in most years, June in some cooler, cloudier ones) and it is getting ready to bolt, I harvest it and replace it with a living mulch of warm-season flowers or herbs. Often, I actually sow them all at the same time right after planting the lettuce, and they all grow together. Once I harvest all the lettuce, the other plants fill in the space formerly occupied by the lettuce.

One key to keeping both your lettuce and spinach going for as long as possible in the heat is to chose the most heat-tolerant varieties you can find. Since you already have your seeds for this year, that's just something to keep in mind for future years as we sometimes go from "too cold" to "too hot" for cool-season crops seemingly overnight. Another is to keep the plants consistently moist.

Both the bitterness observed in hotter weather and the tendency to bolt (go to seed) result from a combination of factors. Heat is the primary driving force behind bitterness and bolting, but dry soil is another, so keeping the soil consistently moist will keep the plants from getting bitter and from bolting quite as early. While I grow lettuce in the ground as I described above, I also grow it in a container. Generally I use either a cattle feed trough (it is on legs, so keeps lettuce above the reach of the bunnies) near the back door so we can step outside and harvest lettuce as we are preparing dinner, or in a rectangular, black concrete-mixing tub that I sometimes have in the garden or at other times in the greenhouse. The advantage of the black tub is that I can move it into deep shade as the weather grows hotter and hotter. Last year the lettuce in that tub was edible even into earlyJuly, but that doesn't always happen. We had a lot of rain beginning in mid-June and the combination of plentiful rainfall and lots of cloudy weather combined to keep the lettuce happier than usual in the warm-growing season. The lettuce in the tub never got bitter--it just bolted, so we just kept using it until it flowered. Then, I abandoned the tub and ignored it. The plants set seed, the seed fell to the surface of the soil, and they sprouted in the fall when temperatures had dropped down into the right range for them. That lettuce from those autumn-sprouted plants is still in the black tub and we're still harvesting it and using it. Because it overwintered, it will bolt soon, and when it does, I'll sow seeds of a Summer Crisp type (more about those in a minute).

After both your spinach and lettuce have germinated, are growing and have gotten a couple of inches tall, mulch the soil well to help keep it cooler and to help keep it moist.

While planting both lettuce and spinach late is not ideal, it also isn't the worse thing in the world either. The kind of harvest you get will be strongly dependent on how quickly your weather gets hot. With lettuce, temperatures in the upper 70s even can induce the plants to bolt. You'll know they are preparing to bolt when the plant suddenly starts to get taller in the center and you see a stem or stalk begin to rise from the center. And, just because those kinds of temperatures can induce bolting, they do not necessarily induce bolting. Usually lettuce in full sun with no mid-day or afternoon shade will bolt earlier. If you only have a sunny garden and not a shady area for lettuce, use other plants or shade cloth to shade it. You can make it last until highs are in the 80s or the lower 90s if you can keep it more shaded and more moist.

Choosing varieties that truly are bolt-resistant in future years will give you lettuce and spinach more deeply into the warm season even if you plant the seeds late like you are this year. Jericho is a romaine lettuce that is slower to bolt than many other kinds of lettuce. The Summer Crisp types of lettuce are very slow to bolt and I have been growing them more and more as my lettuce option for warmer weather, though I grow many other types early in the season for a regular harvest. Summer Crisp is a type of lettuce (it is a batavian lettuce), not a variety name, so there are many varieties in the Summer Crisp series, including Cherokee, Sierra, Nevada, Cardinale and Crispino. I'll sow just about any lettuce variety in February or March for harvest from late March through late April or even later if we don't get too hot too early. However, I'll always plant one or two Summer Crisp types to extend the harvest through May and into June.

While we all try to plant on-time to ensure we get the best results, sometimes Mother Nature just fights us tooth and nail. It is likely that had you planted your lettuce exactly on-time this year, using the planting dates recommended by OSU, it might have frozen during our two late-season snowstorms, depending on whether it was covered by a row cover or tunnel to protect it, and depending on what variety you're growing. Spinach tolerates more cold so might have made it through the snow, but then it also might not have. Often, how cold tolerant a cool-season crop is at a given time will depend on how much prior cold exposure it has had so that it is hardened off and tolerates colder temperatures.

You can expand your greens season in the summer by growing some of the warm-weather spinach and lettuce substitutes if you choose. c1nicolei mentioned climbing spinach, which I assume is a reference to Basella, aka Malabar spinach, which comes in both a red-stemmed (Basella rubra) and a green-stemmed (Basella alba) version. Malabar spinach is native to the African coast and is very heat-tolerant. You can cook it (some people don't like it cooked) or can harvest individual leaves to add to salads. There also are other warm-weather greens subsitutes like amaranth leaves (for recipes that use it, look for callaloo recipes) or New Zealand spinach (tetragonia) or Egyptian spinach (molokhia). You also can grow baby greens or microgreens indoors in a smallish container. In our climate, we sometimes have to get creative to grow greens in the hot weather.

For really outstanding spinach, grow it as a fall crop. Down here in southern OK, we usually wait until October or even early November to sow fall spinach seeds, particularly if the heat just won't cool down. It grows well here in autumn and sometimes it (along with Collard greens) lasts all winter if the winter weather isn't too bitterly cold. You'll get a much better harvest from fall spinach than spring spinach because fall's weather is a better match for what the spinach needs in order to be productive. Just be sure you wait until soil temperatures fall below 80 degrees in the fall so that you'll get good germination rates.

Hope this helps,

Dawn

Yes Dawn, Malabar spinach. I love it fresh or cooked. :o) I only planted 4 seeds, and my fence was covered in vines. Beautiful large green leaves offered attractive color as well as fast growing source of edibles.

It is beautiful and tolerates crazy heat. I haven't grown it the last few years, but have seeds for this year. I usually grow it on the garden fence in the years when I do grow it, so the deer eat the plants a bit now and then, or at least the portion that is on their side of the fence, but it grows so fast that I don't mind if the deer are getting some every now and then. One year I grew it on the entry arbor to the veggie garden and it looked so pretty that I rarely harvested from it because I didn't want to ruin the lush leafy garden entry way.

Does the malabar have a deep rooting system?

Where an you get malibar spinach never heard of it

http://www.rareseeds.com/red-malabar-spinach/has it this year. I might order some. There's still time. I have a lot of bare space in the garden, still. Might be a good cover crop.

Chickencoupe, the root system does not seem deep at all. I pull out in the fall with ease. I ordered seeds online, hate to say I cannot recall the specific site. I made lots of "chips" with the leaves. Seemed to work as good as kale and tasted wonderful!

Thanks, C1nicolei!

Remind us in summer to make chips!

Thanks for the info looks like spinach planting in my future

Y'all remember that Malabar spinach is a true tropical so don't even bother planting it early because it just won't grow until the soil temperatures and air temperatures are nice and warm. If direct sowing, I wait until our soil temperatures hit 80 degrees, and it still takes it 7-10 days to germinate at 80 degrees. Once the weather is hot, it will grow like mad, so there's no reason to try to rush it into the ground early while soil temperatures are cooler than what it likes.

I even see the Red Malabar on the seed racks in stores every now and then, but I generally just order it whenever I am ordering from someone who carries it. A lot of the online seed companies I use do carry the Red Malabar (which generally is considered the better-tasting of the two by most people). In addition to Baker Creek, I've seen the seeds at the websites of Bountiful Gardens, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and Kitazawa Seed. If you let the berries form and mature, they will reseed and you are likely to have Malabar Spinach pop up each year unless you mulch really heavily beneath the plants.

For sure Dawn, no rush on getting them in the ground. Have started inside and direct sow and no benefit to start indoors that I can see. They are rapid growers. The red is more visually appealing as well. Must have been the stalk Jack used to climb into the sky.... oh, yeah, that was a bean. Oops.

They said it was a beanstalk, but how do we know for sure? Hmmm. Maybe it was Malabar Spinach and they just changed it to a beanstalk because they didn't know what Malabar Spinach was. We'll never know for sure. I've never seen a pole bean grow as fast as Malabar can in hot weather.

I thought Jack climbed the purple hyacinth bean? LOL that's what they called it in Denton, Jacks beanstalk