A few years ago when I recalibrated my life to conform to the academic calendar, I curtailed my early-season gardening because I didn’t have enough daylight hours during the week to take care of what I planted. This means that I no longer grow cole crops and greens, whose season has nearly passed by the time the semester ends in mid-May.

The most difficult sacrifice was letting go of growing spinach. Since growing my own, I have never been particularly happy with fresh spinach that I’ve found in grocery stores. It usually seems a little too rubbery, and the flavor is underdeveloped. The typical store-bought bunch also has enough leaves with yellow or split edges to dampen my enthusiasm.

Once I had eaten spinach straight from the garden, I understood why Popeye went ga-ga over it. I realized that children who turn up their noses at the mushy green stuff were unjustly deprived of the opportunity to taste spinach as it was meant to be eaten.

My first attempts at growing spinach were less than satisfying. Spinach seeds, which look like little BBs, are hard-shelled and slow to germinate, even when the soil is kept moist. A lot can go wrong when it takes 10 days for seeds to sprout, and the windy conditions that typically exist in March and April in this region can dry the loose soil around the seeds in just a few hours.

Then I read somewhere that soaking the seeds overnight in distilled water will improve germination. As a matter of fact, many of the seeds will germinate in the water, but if you treat them gently and place them in damp soil, they’ll be fine.

I also made the mistake of trying to reuse spinach seeds from the previous year. Most seeds that you buy for the vegetable garden have a shelf life of at least two years, if you keep them dry and slightly cool  but not spinach. (Parsnip seeds also are good for just one season, in case you were wondering.)

I also made the mistake of treating spinach exactly like lettuce, which typically has tiny, flat, oblong seeds that lend themselves to sprinkling rather than deliberate sowing. I planted the spinach seeds too close together, thinking that I would thin the seedlings as I did my lettuce, and just under the surface of the soil.

As it turned out, spinach seeds should be planted half an inch deep and at least 2 inches apart. You don’t want to thin seedlings that emerge closer than 2 inches apart, because they have better-developed roots than other baby greens, and it’s almost impossible to pull one without damaging the roots of the one closest to it.

Unlike lettuce, which has shallow roots, spinach grows a long tap root by the time it matures. This makes it well-suited for windy conditions. The young seedlings need shelter and consistently damp soil, but once the plants are established, the sturdy root lets them hold their own against all but the stiffest winds.

Once I got the germination thing down and figured out how to space my spinach plants, I had nice crops. I also learned to steer clear of the extreme savoy spinaches, such as Bloomsdale, which have the deeply crinkled leaves that are so difficult to clean. In my experience, the best semisavoy varieties for this climate are Melody, Space and Tyee. All can be harvested about 40 days from germination.

You really don’t want to be planting spinach much past the first of April, unless you can provide some dappled shade. Germination drops sharply in warm weather. A couple of heat-tolerant faux spinaches have received some attention in recent years and may be worth a try.

One is called New England Spinach, or tetragone, an abbreviated version of its botanical name. It produces flat leaves that taste quite a bit like spinach. The other is Malabar spinach, a climbing plant that produces large leaves for harvest approximately three months after germination.

 When she’s not writing about foods and gardening, Gwyn Mellinger is teaching journalism at Baker University. Her phone number is (785) 594-4554.