The Surprising Story of Spinach

Welcome to the Grow youw Self Podcast. Surprising stories about the food we eat and inspiring conversations about what it really takes to live the whole and happy life.

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My name's Nicole John C. Burke and I'm the owner of Rooted Garden and Gardenary Incorporated and author of the upcoming book Kitchen Garden Revival. Is it obvious I'm kind of obsessed with the kitchen garden?

Each week here on the Grow youw.

Self podcast, you're going to be shocked at the things you'll learn about foods you eat every single day. And you'll feel encouraged to take little steps in your own busy schedule and to create a more whole and happy life for yourself. So turn up the volume and let's take a walk, go on a drive, or just hang out in the kitchen garden together. Every time you listen, I promise you'll learn something that will help you grow yourself in a new and exciting way. Sound good? I think so. Now let's dig in.

I realized there were no good role models for kids. You know the cartoon Popeye? He eats spinach, but he also smokes and hits people. I loved reading this quote about spinach and that is the topic we are diving into today on the Grow youw Self Podcast. Today's episode is brought to you by my Garden Goals Workshop. I'm opening up my Kitchen Garden Academy this month and I cannot wait to teach you how to make your own garden goals happen. So I recorded a workshop, it's about an hour long, to teach you how to make your own garden goals happen. Even if you don't think you have the time, the space, the money, or the experience to make it happen in 2020. You can learn more about the Garden Goals Workshop on the blog@gardenary.com and on the HomeP page. So come check it out, Watch my free workshop and consider joining the Kitchen Garden Academy this month. But for now, let's learn about this vegetable that made Popeye so strong even though he still hit people and smoked a pipe. I can't wait to tell you the surprising stories about spinach today. You're going to be so surprised and have a new determination to grow your own and buy locally. I promise. Let's dive in to today's episode of the Grow youw Self podcast. Welcome back to the Grow youw Self Podcast. I want to start out by thanking you all so much for listening to, Rating, Reviewing, Subscribing to Grow Yourself I had to share this amazing review from the Oily Outlaw. Love your name, she says. Humor, history and science. Love these well rounded episodes they are packed with so much good info. Each listen gets me excited about my own garden. Nicole is a very positive ray of sunshine. Well, the Oli Outlaw, thank you so much for your review and I hope that you get some sunshine today. If you guys would help me out by subscribing and leaving your own review. Even if you don't have something positive to say, that's okay. Every review helps. Apple and Spotify and iHeartRadio know who to show the podcast to and hopefully get more of the world waking up to the awesome experience of learning more about our good food and doing three things that can change everything, which is to eat seasonally, to buy locally, and to grow naturally. We're going to talk more about how to do all three of those things in today's episode. The Surprising Story of Spinach. I've been so excited to tell you more about spinach since the podcast began because it is literally one of the most popular vegetables in the grocery store in the garden. I got some surprising stories to tell you. So let's start off with Popeye. Do you guys know Popeye? I grew up watching Popeye cartoons. My sister Joanna, she kind of got to control the remote when I was growing up and I don't know, she liked Popeye. And is it olive oil? Was his wife? I don't know. Anyway, he ate canned spinach and I'm going to tell you why. So this is a crazy story that was revealed recently. Back in 1870, way, way back, this guy named Erich von Wolf was a German chemist and he was examining the amount of iron in spina alongside other vegetables. So he was writing down all of the nutritional benefits and accidentally moved the decimal point when he was writing down the notes from his book. So instead of saying that spinach has 3.5 milligrams of iron in 100 grams serving, he accidentally wrote that there's 35 milligrams in 100 gram serving of spinach. Spinach. So basically 10 times the amount and made it seem like the supernatural superfood. The equivalent is that eating 100 grams of spinach would be similar to eating a small piece of a paper clip. Basically crazy amounts of iron in a few leaves of spinach. So unfortunately, this mistake got printed and recreated and people didn't question it. So when the cartoon Popeye was created, they decided to have him eat spinach as his kind of like kryptonite or is it anti kryptonite? I don't know, but like, as his superpower. So anytime he needed lots of power to beat somebody up. He would down a can of spinach and suddenly become supernaturally powerful. So in case you're way too young to remember this cartoon, be sure to Google it. Popeye eating spinach. I'm sure it's going to make your day. So finally, they figured out the error in their ways of this decimal point being misplaced and actually made it very clear. But not until 1981 in the British Medical Journal, they published the article to explain what had happened and how basically the world had been wrong about how much iron was in spinach. We're going to talk a little bit more about this in a second. About the fact that even though there is a lot of iron in spinach, not 35 milligrams, that even with the large amount of iron, it doesn't necessarily mean our bodies get to enjoy it. So now that we know that we can't always trust the scientists, let's talk a little bit more about spinach. So. So it's pretty crazy, but spinach has really taken off in popularity over the last, say, 20 years. Everybody's growing more and selling more, and there is taking up more and more of the farmland. Believe it or not, the US is the second largest producer of spinach in the world. But get this, the US only produces 3% of the world's spinach. So we're the second largest producer, but we only produce 3%. And you're not going to believe which country produces the most. Can you guess in your mind who you think it would be? I had no idea. So China actually is number one. And get this, they produce 85% of the world's spinach. 85%. I tried to do research, but honestly could not figure out what in the world are they doing with all this spinach? I mean, are they eating it? Are they exporting it to say? My thought is that they're likely exporting frozen spinach from all this growth. I'm sure they're also eating a ton of it. When I lived in China, we had fresh greens on all of our dishes, so it was never raw. We would always cook it in, like, a soup pot or saute it. But definitely fresh greens were like, like a constant every single meal. And obviously they have lots of people to feed in China. But I do have suspicions that probably a good bit of the world's frozen spinach has to be coming from China, since they're literally growing 85% of it. Is that crazy? So in the US, our little measly 3% of production we are growing most of our spinach in just four states. California, Arizona, New Jersey and Texas actually account for 98% of the commercial fresh spinach that's grown in our country. Four states represent 98%. What that generally means is most of the spinach that you're buying from the grocery store didn't come from anywhere near you unless you live in one of those four states. In fact, 90% of the US spinach is grown just in California and Arizona. So if you missed the romaine calm episode of grow yourself, then you should go back and listen to it because it has a lot of similarities with spinach. Honestly, most of our spinach, just like romaine, is grown in basically two places in the U.S. salinas Valley in California and the Yumas Valley in Arizona. So this is because spinach loves cooler weather. It loves the temps between about 45 and 75 degrees. So most of our spinach is grown in California through their summer, spring and fall, and then the growth moves over to Arizona in the winter. So, yeah, kind of a bummer to think how much spinach is getting moved and trucked across the country all the time, right? Well, and it's not just, you know, a small amount. Actually, the reports that I read said that the acreage of fresh market spinach in California keeps growing. In fact, in 2001, they had given about 15,000 acres to spinach. And then in 2011, 10 years later, they'd given 15,000. Did I just say that right? No. 19,600. So almost 5,000 more acres to spinach. And it just keeps increasing. So they attribute most of this to the fact that we are loving eating baby greens. So if you buy any of those spring mixes or those little boxes and bags from the grocery, more than likely those have a ton of small little spinach leaves in them because we're just kind of all obsessed with eating those baby greens right now. So that's where they attribute most of the growth to. So let's talk about how they're actually growing it. This is a little crazy to me. I think so used to what they would do in these large farm fields in Arizona or California, maybe some in Texas, is they would have 40 inch wide beds. So that's, that's just under four feet. So if you've ever grown in a raised bed, generally the typical width of a bed is four feet wide. So they were growing pretty much in that kind of spread. So a 40 inch wide bed, and they would plant it pretty thickly with spinach seeds and then come across and harvest them all at once with a machine. But in the late 1980s, so I don't know, Gosh, that's a long time ago now, isn't it? Like 30 years ago, they started planting in 80 inch wide beds. So instead of like equivalent to like a four foot bed that's like a little bit under seven feet wide. So imagine having a garden bed that's seven feet wide. This is important to imagine because I'm going to explain something about the methods they're having to use in a second. So imagine a seven foot wide bed and they're planting super dense. So they're putting lots of spinach seeds all close together. So what they'll do is they'll plant the spinach seed very, very close together in this almost 7 foot wide bed and then they come across and harvest with a machine. So the spinach is clipped about 2 inches above the soil surface. So this allows them to harvest and grow way more spinach all at once. So they're saying they plant like 2 to 4 million seeds per acre and then harvest the baby. And then they even call them teenage leave. So the baby leaves are like 2 to 3 inches long. This is what you're probably getting in those little baby spring mix boxes you're buying from the store. And then the teenage leaves would be more probably in those bagged where you get basically primarily and only spinach leaves. So when they're growing this much spinach in this tight of an area, you can imagine that there's some difficulties. So one of the problems with beds this wide is they can't use drip irrigation for this, this wide of bed. So they're having to use sprinklers. And with sprinklers you end up with more water on the leaves, which is not good for growing greens. We'll talk about this in a little bit as I give you some more tips about growing your own spinach. So they end up with some issues with the sprinklers and then they also have a little bit of challenge with the nitrogen use for the spinach. So when you're growing greens, the main nutrient that those greens need, need to produce and grow healthy is nitrogen. So what will happen oftentimes with spinach is in the first few weeks, the spinach doesn't really need that much nitrogen. But then as the spinach starts to really pick up production and grow those bigger leaves that they're going to harvest, the leaves definitely need, they take up a lot more nitrogen per day. So being able to feed and give that kind of nutrients to plants in such a dense area has proven to be pretty difficult. So I'm telling you all this to explain kind of the backstory of why I would love to see more people eating locally, eating seasonally, and buying locally grown spinach or even growing their own. One more interesting thing about the way that this spinach is grown en masse is also the fact that they cannot have a lot of weeds in there. So the problem would be because these leaves are getting harvested by machine and then kind of sorted out by machine. The last thing you want to see when you open your box of organic spinach, or not organic, but just any kind of spinach from the store is a bunch of grass, right? Or some weeds that you're not interested in eating. So this has provided some big challenges for the mass production of spinach. So if you're not buying organic, like just in traditionally grown spinach fields, what they end up doing is using some, they call it pre emergent herbicides. So what that means is they put down this herbicide, this thing that will keep other types of plants from growing in that space so that they don't grow alongside the spinach. So there's a couple of different ones that they have to put down, and then they'll do it again. When all that spinach is growing, you can imagine all those leaves so tightly packed together, they also have greater possibility with the water on the leaves for getting things like mildew on the leaves and then also a downy mildew, and then also getting pests. So they end up having to treat both for weeds and for pests on those very tightly grown spinach leaves. Now, in organic production, they're not allowed to do those pre emergent herbicides. So basically what they then have to do is a lot of weeding and organic pest control. And this is why you see such a price difference when you're buying organic versus just traditionally grown spinach. You're basically paying for that important labor of people coming in and more mindfully weeding the fields, rather than spraying these herbicides on the fields before the spinach starts to grow. So that's oftentimes when you see the difference between the prices of organic and normally grown. That's the reason. But even though the price is high, I want to encourage you, if you aren't growing your own, to definitely buy organic. And this is why spinach continues to climb on the list of the Dirty Dozen. Are you familiar with Dirty Dozen? So this is a list from the Environmental Working Group, and It's the top 12 vegetables and fruits that you should definitely buy organic because when tested, these, these foods show up with the highest rate of pesticides and herbicides, basically synthetic materials that you do not want to be digesting. These are the ones that show up with the greatest number on them when tested. So the Latest tests from 2015 and 16 showed a big increase in pesticide residues on non organic spinach. So spinach used to be in, I think, the lower part of the Dirty dozen list. It used to be like number eight, and now spinach is number two. So from a recent list, strawberries are number one on the Dirty dozen, then spinach, then kale, nectarines, apples, and then number six is grapes. So you really want to prioritize if you're trying to decide which things to buy organically and which things or buy organic and which things you might want to pass or aren't as important. Spinach is definitely one of those things that you want to prioritize buying as organic for that very reason. So you definitely want to be avoiding. I like to say I teach this in my salad school, you know, that it's kind of a bummer to think that you're eating salad to be healthy. And, you know, unbeknownst to you, you're actually downing synthetic, you know, materials that are bad for you at the same time. Like, how weird is that? Right? One of the reasons why I love encouraging people to first eat seasonally. So eating spinach that can, eating it when it can be grown near you versus eating the spinach that's grown year round from those four states, mostly from California and Arizona. That's what we run into when we try to eat things that aren't in season around us is there's all these kind of production issues with it to make that possible for us that we don't usually think about when we are like, oh, I want a spinach salad in August. Right. We don't really think through if we're in a very hot summer where we live. The fact all that had to happen for that bag of spinach to be at the grocery store and at our disposal. So, yeah, pretty crazy, right? So we just talked about how spinach is grown now. I want to talk a little bit about its history and then I'm going to teach you how to grow your own. So spinach actually was first grown in Persia or modern day Iran. Iran. Iran. I don't know. However you pronounce Iran, I say Iran, hopefully. That's right. Then it went to India and then China. And the Chinese actually call spinach the Persian vegetable. And obviously they loved it because now they're, like, the greatest producer of spinach in the world. People from the Iranian era brought spinach to Italy in what they think is 827. And basically, during the time when Middle Eastern or Muslim people were like, the primary, I guess, rulers of the Mediterranean, they say that spinach was super popular there, and they were growing it like crazy. In fact, they called spinach the chieftain of leafy greens. Spinach came to England and France in the 14th century from Spain and really became popular in England and in France, mostly because they were. So they loved the fact that spinach could grow at a time when most of their other vegetables had not yet started growing. So, as you'll learn in a second when I give you some tips on growing your own spinach loves growing in cooler temperatures. So it's one of those first things to pop up in early spring. And this really filled a void for the French and English cultures. Also in these two cultures, they were pretty strong Catholics at that time. And if you know much about the Catholic tradition, in early spring, from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday is a period known as Lent. And it's a time that you give up certain things as a way of sacrifice. And so they liked having spinach during this time because they were often giving up, say, meat or other types of foods that would generally get them through colder temperatures. And so spinach was, like, one of those things that wasn't off limits. That would be kind of funny to make spinach off limits, don't you think? I guess some people would want to do that. So Catherine de Medici was the queen of France, and she loved spinach so much that she ordered it for every single meal. And she was from Florence. So even nowadays, things that have spinach in them are often called Florentine because of her. So I'm pretty sure my mom has a couple recipes I've eaten of hers that are like Spinach Florentine or something like that. And who knew? But it all goes back to a queen of France. Pretty cool in World War II. I mean, World War I, this was during that time, they were really believing that spinach had a huge iron content. And so they actually would mix spinach juice with wine for soldiers in the war, especially French soldiers. So they would give them wine mixed with spinach juice, hoping that it would build their iron and help them to recover. So it wasn't until the early 19th century that America first got introduced to spinach. And this was from European colonists coming over, so they would bring their spinach with them. Pretty cool, right? So even all the way back to 1806, that's one of the first records we have of spinach being grown in the United States. In North America, spinach began to be cultivated and enjoyed here in our culture. But I think it's important and good to know that spinach didn't start in the US So maybe that's part of the challenge of why we're trying to grow it year round. And we're focusing only in a few states of our country to grow it because it's not necessarily from here originally. Now, there are three different types of spinach. There's a savoy, and that is. Savoy is really another word for bumpy. So savoy is that bumpiest kind of spinach. Then there's a semi savoy, which is just what it sounds like. It's like sort of bumpy, sort of not. And then there's a smooth spinach. So smooth spinach is generally becoming the more popular variety that we're buying at the grocery. And a lot of that is because it's much easier to clean. So when you have all those bumps in those leaves, it's harder to get the dust particles and dirt and stuff like that with a smooth one, obviously, it's just simpler. Now, spinach is a member of the amaranth plant family, amaranthacei, something like that. This is literally the superfood family. I don't know if there is a plant family that we eat typically, like in our everyday dishes that could be better for our body. So inside of this family is our beets and Swiss chard and amaranth, obviously. So these are those foods that all the doctors say, like, they're full of antioxidants, they're full of so many vitamins, tons of fiber, and just super, super good for our bodies. This, I think, is one of the other reasons why spinach has taken off with popularity. And people are eating it in all different kinds of ways. But there are more foods in this plant family we can enjoy beyond spinach. And so we're going to do this with a food fight in a second. So spinach is a great source of all kinds of nutrients. Vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin K, vitamin B6, folate, and iron, as you heard earlier, not as much iron as that guy, that great scientist thought way back, but it does have a good bit of iron. But they're saying that even though it has a lot of iron, we actually, our bodies can. We can't take it up in the way that our body takes up iron from other foods. So sometimes some of these numbers can be misleading because it looks like our body's gonna get all these nutrients when really they don't because our body doesn't have a way to absorb it. So take that for what it's worth. It's definitely full of vitamins and of course you're gonna get a little bit of iron, even if not all of it. And the studies do show that your body takes up more when you eat it cooked rather than raw. It definitely has lots of magnesium and in a great book, eat to sleep or something like that, all about foods that you should eat to sleep better. Spinach is high on the list because it's got magnesium that relaxes our nerves and muscles and can also prevent leg cramps and is a good source of calcium and supposedly helps your brain manufacture melatonin. So you can make yourself a little spinach smoothie or health. Have a spinach warm dish at dinner and check out and see if you just might sleep better. All right. Hearing how spinach is grown en masse and trucked across the country, hopefully you're feeling encouraged to try to grow your own. I sure hope you are. If you are in a milder climate right now in the US So I'm recording this in April, then right now is a great time to grow spinach right where you are. So before temps reach, say the high the mid 80s to high 90s, it's an awesome time to grow spinach. So in my clients gardens in Houston, we grow spinach through the winter. And here in my garden in Chicago, I've got spinach growing in my kitchen garden right now. And I'll likely grow it through most of the summer and then grow it again in the fall. So spinach loves to grow in a sandy loam soil. It doesn't like its its roots to stay super wet. So the drainage of the sandy loam soil helps a lot. You guys. If you are in my kitchen garden academy, you'll learn all about setting up a great sandy loam soil base. And it's also in my book Kitchen Garden Revival. Spinach grows super fast. In fact, those mass producers, they start harvesting it around 25 days after planting, which is crazy. It does love growing in cooler seasons from 45 to 75 degrees. And you want to plant it pretty shallow, so don't plant it more than three quarters of an inch deep. And you can plant it pretty thickly, but you don't want to have a Bunch of seeds coming up all close together. Once those seeds pop up, you're going to want to come back and thin them to about one every three to four inches. Now, if your temperatures are staying fairly low, you can do what we call successive planting. Successive seeding is where you're going to come back and, and say a row over, maybe 3 to 4 or 5 inches of a row, right next to the one you just planted. You can start seed again. And what this ends up producing for you is you get this continuous supply of fresh spinach again and again. It's a super great way to make the most of your space. Now, if you're in a colder climate, you do want to protect your spinach in the early season, so you can protect it with a cold frame or frost cloth, or you could even mulch it over winter. One of my favorite growers, Hillary, at Seattle Urban Farm Company, she always posts how she overwinters her spinach in the Seattle area. And it is gorgeous. So I think she mulches over it and then it just pops back up so fast when their weather start to warm. I could be wrong about that. But check her out at Seattle Urban Farm Company. Now, common spinach, like the kind that you're buying from the grocery, that 98% that's grown in those four states isn't going to grow in the middle of the summer. So it's kind of ironic because most of us associate fresh salads with summer eating. But spinach is definitely not a hot summer food. There are other greens you can grow that have the spinach name, but they're not actually spinach. So I'm going to do some episodes on these greens. In the summer. They're known as New Zealand spinach or Malabar spinach. I don't know why they gave them the spinach name. Maybe just because they want to trick us. But we do grow Malabar spinach and New Zealand spinach in Houston Gardens in the summer. They're beautiful green, but they are very different in a totally different family. So we'll cover that in a later episode. But just know that if you are wanting to grow your spinach, the time to plant is right now. If you're in a milder climate, and if you're in a hot climate, you won't be able to grow spinach again until fall unless you try to grow a little bit indoors, which maybe you could try. So you can start it indoors, but it's really not recommended. In fact, I think it's so much better to just direct seed your Spinach right into your garden bed. Remember that spinach, like most lettuces, has a very shallow root system, so they're pretty easily damaged from getting moved around. That's why it's great to just start them right inside your garden. As soon as the soil can be worked, you can plant spinach seeds. In fact, my daughter and I, we planted spinach, I think 2-28-I posted a video on Instagram of us doing that. So as soon as the soil was soft enough, we just went in and planted that spinach seed. Now, it's taken quite a while to start growing, but it is how happening. So those are some tips to grow your own spinach. If you're not into growing your own, I want you to first do a little bit of thinking about your own climate and your temperatures and noticing when your temps range between 45 to 75 degrees. That is really your optimal time to be eating spinach. If you want to be eating seasonally, which I would love it if you would make that a goal. So mark the dates, the months of the year, when season when spinach would be in season, when the temps are between 45 and 75, and look for locally grown spinach during that time. So you can call your farmer's market, you can check out your local farmers, check out your local CSAs. I would pretty much guarantee that your local farmers are going to have spinach ready for you during those months of the year for your climate. So unless you're living in California or Arizona, it would be super awesome if you would prioritize buying locally. Well, those people can buy locally too. But waiting to buy spinach or buying the majority of your spinach during the time when it is being grown in your local area, and then after you're trying to eat seasonally and buy locally, then maybe you can try to start growing your own. I think spinach is one of the great beginners plants to grow in your kitchen garden because you get to harvest it so quickly, it doesn't take up a lot of space. And like I said, the root systems are pretty shallow. So you can plant them in a pot or a container and they work really, really well. If you're not going to do any of those things, I do at least highly recommend that you buy organically grown spinach. Like you heard today, the pesticide and the herbicide is just not a good thing. With all that spinach being grown in mass, especially be careful if you're eating out and buying spinach. You want to be asking how that spinach was grown because it's kind of a bummer to think that you're filling up on good stuff and right alongside of it you're eating pesticides and herbicides. Yuck. Right? We're going to finish up with a food fight. I thought it'd be fun to have Swiss chard go against spinach since they're in the same plant family. And my good friend Joyce, who has taught me so much about the garden, she's the one who introduced me to Swiss chard as a great spinach alternative. And I do have to say I love it as a spinach alternative. It doesn't have that rubbery taste to me as much. And anyway, I love it. So here we go. I'll try not to sway you too hard. But spinach and Swiss chard are pretty close in most of their vitamins. So they're pretty equal in terms of vitamin E and vitamin A. They both provide with. Let's see. Spinach provides 377% of your daily value of vitamin A and Swiss chard provides 214%. So spinach does beat out chard on that one. They both have tons of vitamin K. Both of them produce more than 700% of your recommended daily allowance for vitamin K. But Swiss chard wins that one with 716%. No, sorry. Spinach wins that one with 987% of your vitamin K. So spinach is winning with those two vitamins. Spinach does come out on top with calcium as well. It provides about 24% of your daily value compared to Swiss Chard's 10%. And they both are good sources of iron. Not as much as that guy said that scientists said, but. But spinach has 36% and Swiss chard has 22%. So spinach comes out on most of the numbers, honestly on top. But the thing that's unique about Swiss chard is it does come in a variety of colors, especially if you grow the bright lights variety. And the studies have shown those brightly colored stems like the red purples and the yellow oranges have a betaline pigment which is known as to have special antioxidant and anti inflammatory properties. Those colors do special things in our bodies that fight cancer and disease and free radicals or whatever those things are. So it's just a super powerful great thing for your body. And spinach though you can get the red veined varieties of spinach. Most spinach that are just green and white aren't going to have have those like Swiss chard does. I personally think you should grow both. So Swiss chard's going to take up a lot more room. One plant of Swiss chard could eventually take up almost a full square foot of the garden, but you'll get tons and tons of harvest from the Swiss chard and then spinach is going to take up less space. But it isn't as hardy through the warmer weather. So I found I've kept Swiss chard alive even in my Houston summer gardens and through more of the winter. Whereas spinach is going to be a little bit more intolerant of the heat, actually, a lot more intolerant of the heat. So if you're wanting to grow something and maybe you're in like a warmer climate and you're wanting to grow a spinach alternative, I highly recommend Swiss chard. So that about wraps up the surprising story of spinach. I hope that your eyes have been opened to the fact that there's a lot more going on behind that bag of spinach you're just casually picking up from the grocery store or that box of baby spinach greens. Now, hopefully you have a picture in your mind of these 80 inch wide rows that are being planted all at once and harvested by a machine and then put into cold storage and then put into bags and boxes and shipped across the country. I personally would love to see us move the needle and have less of our greens all grown in one or two places at the U.S. i think greens are one of those things. We could really change the world by growing more of those locally. So even in colder climates or warmer climates, a lot can be done under greenhouses and frost cloths and cold frames. And so I think we could change so much of our fuel supply and all these synthetic things that are going into our foods. I think we can make a big difference if we all took efforts to eat seasonally, buy locally, and grow naturally. At least are greens. And spinach is one of those great ones to start and grow yourself. I hope you feel encouraged. There will be more notes on growing your own spinach, as well as some of my favorite seed varieties and other tips on getting your spinach garden going. This year in the show notes@thegardenary.com that'll go up today as the podcast comes up too. So yeah, make sure that you think twice before you buy that spinach from the grocery and be encouraged to down your own spinach grown straight from your own garden or your local farmer. Whatever you do, don't eat a can of spinach and assume that you're going to get superpowers like Popeye, but I do think you're to going going to feel super good when you fill up on all this good stuff. Thanks so much for listening to the Surprising Story of Spinach and I will see you next week. Thanks again for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. Don't forget that today's episode is brought to you by My God Garden Goals Workshop. I'm going to be teaching you in this one hour free class how to make your own garden goals happen this spring. Even if you don't think you've got the time, space, money or experience to make it happen, this is a super fun workshop. I'm going to give you the behind the scenes on how you can set up and grow your own successful garden. I've got a really unique perspective on all of those ideas of the time, space, money and experience that I'm sure you have not heard from any other garden teacher. So check it out today on the show Notes for this podcast@gardenary.com blog and you'll see more about the Garden Goals workshop on the homepage of gardenary.com go check it out. Sign Up Watch this workshop and consider if this is your season, to sign up and join me inside the Kitchen Garden Academy. I can't wait to to teach a whole group of you new students how to set up and plan and plant your own kitchen garden this spring. Thanks again for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. Don't forget to subscribe, leave a review and DM me a picture of you listening. I would love to share it with my friends on Instagram gardenaryco. I love you guys. Hang in there. We're gonna get through this tough time together by growing ourself in new ways every single single week. I'll see you next week on the Grow youw Self podcast.