Local Spinach in January!

Greg Welna and Mary Jo Borden of Welden Farm moved to rural Boaz five years ago. Since then, Greg has tried many farming ventures on their 80 acres of woods, hay, & pasture ground: heirloom tomatoes & other veggies, llamas & alpacas, rhubarb, beef cattle… The only thing he couldn’t figure out was the vegetables. He really enjoyed growing them, but, like many vegetable growers in the region, was discouraged by the amount of competition & difficulty of selling his product. After a couple of years he found he could barely give his beautiful tomatoes away in the peak of the season. He decided to try something radically different – grow veggies in the winter.

Walking into one of Greg’s balmy greenhouses on a blustery but sunny late November day, he plucked a couple of big fat spinach leaves for Charlene and me to snack on and told us his Winter Spinach Story.

After giving up on summertime veggies, Greg and Mary Jo did some serious research and settled on growing winter greens in their two 30’ x 75’ hoop-greenhouses. They weren’t sure which greens would do best, how long they could extend the season, or to what extent they’d have to heat them. Now, in their third year of winter growing, Greg has found he can grow spinach, completely without heat, all winter long and into spring.

Now, before anybody goes out and orders a greenhouse and spinach seed, let me tell you this winter spinach operation isn’t as easy as it may seem. In order for the soil to maintain moisture and sustain the spinach through the long, cold season it must be enriched with a whole lot of organic matter. It then has to be soaked for weeks before planting to hold moisture in the soil through the winter (it’s hard to irrigate when it’s frozen). Timing is critical with the whole operation – Greg succession plants his twelve 75’ rows every three days starting in the beginning of September. If it’s too hot and sunny in the fall, some of these beds will bolt and be worthless. If it’s too cloudy & cold, they won’t get established in time for the really cold weather and won’t produce well.
After the plants are established and winter has begun, Greg is pretty much a slave to his greenhouses. Reemay, a spun polyester/polypropylene row-cover, must get spread over the spinach beds like a blanket faithfully every afternoon and removed every morning (unless it’s super cloudy all day, then they stay tucked in). Remove it too late on a sunny morning and the plants fry. Remove it too early & they stay too frozen to harvest.

Not heating the greenhouses means the spinach freezes every night. But every day, except on the coldest, cloudiest days, it thaws and looks just as gorgeous as you see it in our produce case! Greg says this miracle still astounds him every time. The more the spinach freezes, the sweeter it gets. Greg hand picks his spinach daily, on his hands and knees, with a pair of scissors. There’s a method even to his picking – in order for the plants to keep producing he must pick the biggest leaves that shade the ground first. Without removing them for even a day, those leaves will get too big to sell, the ground won’t warm up, and new leaves will not grow.

After picking, the spinach must be washed and spun dry inside in small batches. Then it must be sold and delivered. Greg likes to deliver within a day or two of harvest so it can be eaten as fresh as possible.

When Greg and Mary Jo approached me to sell their spinach at the Co-op last year, we were very excited to replace some of the baby spinach traveling all the way from California. I was concerned at first about the price – their wholesale price is about what the California stuff retails for – but once I saw it and tasted it, my worry changed to: can you bring us enough of it??!
The superiority of this product goes far beyond the local-ness and subsequent freshness of it. Being hand-chosen, every leaf is perfect: dark green, thick, tender, sweet… I swear you can taste the sweetness the frost has produced and the abundant minerals the rich soil has provided. Every way we’ve tried it is fantastic: raw in salads and sandwiches; wilted, sauteed, steamed; added to eggs, soups, sauces, pizzas… you name it. Nobody wants the limp, pale green baby California stuff after they try Greg’s amazing spinach. And we love not having to ship it in 2,000 miles. So if you haven’t tried it yet, give Welden Farm spinach a try – I guarantee you’ll come back for more!