Lettuce and Spinach earliest planting in back to new planting in front

I love love love having lettuce and Spinach in the garden.  I’m a big salad person and it is great to be able make one anytime you want.  My husband and I have found that when planting lettuce and spinach it’s better to stagger the planting rather than plant a whole row.  We never eat a whole row of lettuce and spinach before it starts to flower.  Once they flower the leaves start to turn bitter.  By staggering the planting I can continually have lettuce and spinach throughout the season.

Spring mix variety

Lettuce is a pretty easy plant to grow.  It is tolerant to cold weather, which is great around here.  I usually get two different varieties.  One is a spring mix and the other a buttercrisp. The spring mix is a mix of different lettuce varieties put together.  I like those because you get a colorful and different tasting variety.  Some leaves are purple others have a different leave shape.  Some taste a little bitter or more salty, and some are sweeter.  I also plant a buttercrisp variety which is your usual green leaf lettuce.  I happen to like the taste of this variety so if I were you just pick a variety that is your favorite.  I don’t usually have any problems with the lettuce I guess the only issue I have is sometimes when I pick them there are earwigs on them.  I absolutely can’t stand earwigs.  So before bringing the heads in the house to wash I just give them a good shake.  The lettuce when I pick it sometimes feels a little wilted but that isn’t a problem.  All you need to do is bring it in and wash it really good and put it in a container and then put it in the fridge.  It crisps right up after it chills for a while.

Spinach

Spinach is nice to have but takes a little more work to grow.  I haven’t been very successful with growing spinach.  This year has been better than most.  Spinach loves sandy soil and we just don’t have that.  Our soil has a lot of clay and makes it really tough for spinach to thrive.  The best solution would be for us to amend our soil with some sand but we just have not done that yet.  Another problem I have discovered is that something is eating my spinach.  The leaves were turning a weird almost opaque color.  At first glance I thought it might have some kind of fungus.  Then I picked a leave and noticed some kind of grub eating between the outer layers of the leaf.  Yuck! I don’t want that in my salad.  I don’t usually like to use pesticides or harsh fertilizers on my garden.  This time I decided if I wanted spinach I had to do something.  So I removed all the infected leaves and spayed on Fungicide 3.  It’s a product from garden safe.  It is supposed to be a fungicide, insecticide, and miticide all in one.  I’m not sure what I’m trying to kill so I’m not sure if this will work.  You’re supposed to spray it on every 7 to 10 days until all leaves are uninfected.  I sprayed it on last week and again today.  Each time I remove the infected leaves.  Hopefully the spinach starts to look better soon.  Do you have any ideas?

Infected Spinach Leaf