Nobody could deny if spinach has a good benefit and taste. If you want to have spinach plant in your garden, you can try to harvest by yourself. However, harvesting spinach is not something hard to do. There are a lot of people who have already shared the best tips on how to harvest and store spinach. If you already have spinach in your garden, it must be easy for you to do anything and get the benefit.
Spinach leaves have a lot of vitamin C that is really important to your body. You can enjoy the leave fresh or cooked with a lot of different methods. However, once you want to harvest the spinach, you need to make sure that you already know the better way of harvesting. Harvest time is really important, to make sure that you already picking up the best process until the plant growing up well.
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The Best Time to Pick Spinach
People often say that some of the spinach might have a bitter taste, that must happen when temperatures soar. That is why you need to pick for the best harvest time for having a great leaves quality. There is nothing more important than to have good spinach that is really fresh and ready to consume. Even today, people tend to do organic gardening and hydroponic gardening for having a good spinach quality.
Consider the picking up of spinach is really important, you need to know how to prevent bolting to keep the freshness. You need to know that spinach will flower or bolt when the temperatures are warm and the sun is high. There is a lot of spinach variety, and have a different stage to grow. However, most varieties mature in 37 to 45 days. After that day, it can be harvested as soon as possible with five or six leaves.
Most people believe that baby spinach leaves have a sweeter flavor with a tender texture. However, it should be removed from the tree as long as they get yellow or with full leaf formation. You can harvest spinach when the leaves are tender, which is big enough to eat. Which also ready for picking 40 to 65 days after sowing. It must be important to make sure that you already know the timing for harvesting the spinach.
Harvesting Spinach with The Best Method
There are a lot of methods that you can do for harvesting the spinach. However, you can always have the best step to apply before harvesting your spinach. Many people asking for how to harvest and store spinach really well, but they do not understand the characteristic of this plant.
1. Cut the spinach leaf
You need to cut the spinach leaf by the outer side. Then you need to allow the inner leaves to grow larger. Most people will try to cut away the whole plant one inch or equal to 2.5cm above the soil. If you do not cut the leaves the plant will keep producing new leaves as long as the temperature is right for spinach to growth.
2. Harvest near to the mealtime
If you want to have a great spinach taste, you need to make sure that you are harvesting the spinach at the right time. Most people will try to harvest spinach as close to mealtime as possible. This happens because they want to have the best flavor.
3. Clean the leaves
The next step is to clean the leaves. You can fill a sink with water, and rinse the leaves. This is really important to make sure that the leaves you consume are clean. After you washed the leaves you can drain the water. However, if the soil keep remains, you need to repeat this step until it gets really clean. You can also dry the leaves using a towel or other things.
How to Store Spinach
Storing spinach must be important, to make sure that you can use it while it is still fresh. You need to store in a good place with the perfect temperature. Most people get failed, and the spinach leaves are easy to get worse. However, your house needs to have a good temperature, or you can use your refrigerator to find out the best place of how to harvest and store spinach.
1. Temperatures options
When you want to store your spinach, you need to find a place that is cold and moist around 32 to -40 Fahrenheit. Regarding the humidity, you cannot underestimate if you could get failed because of bad humidity. If you want to keep your spinach fresh, you need to set the humidity into 95 percent relative humidity.
2. Placed in refrigerator
Another efficient way that you can do is to place the leaves in the refrigerator. However, you need to use a plastic bag to close the air to enter the bag. You can keep your spinach in the refrigerator for about 10 days.
3. Do not put in too hot or too cold temperature
If you want to have better quality, you need to make sure that the temperature is not too hot and too cold. If this happens, it will develop brown spots on the midrib and the leaves. Sometimes, it would turn the leaves into yellow and not fresh again to consume.
Benefit of Spinach
Except it has a delicious taste while you cook spinach. You need to know that spinach has a lot of benefits for your health. Especially, if you want to increase your living quality. People often consume spinach for their daily routine. It could be cooked or drink it as a juice. Here is some benefit of spinach that you need to know:
- Strengthen your bones with vitamin K.
- Strengthen your eyesight and immunity with a lot of carotenes, zeaxanthin, lutein, and chlorophyll.
- Good for your eyes with vitamin A.
- Promote your heart health with vitamin C.
- Consist of a lot of folates to energize your body.
After you find out the benefit and another important step about how to harvest and store spinach, you can understand if spinach must give you a better quality of life quality. However, considering the temperatures must be important to your spinach plant. As you also need to harvest the spinach as long as you are going to consume it.
