When lettuce and spinach bolt, summer greens keep growing
As recorded: In the months a place's lettuce and spinach run to seed in the heat, Malabar spinach, New Zealand spinach, amaranth and sweet potato leaves keep producing leaf, given steady water and feeding.
A good hunch A person has checked it against its sources. If you skip this, it still grows, just less well. The planner suggests it.
How it works
Heat is what sends lettuce and spinach to seed. These four are warm-season leaf crops that grow best in the heat that ends a lettuce crop, so the same months are their season. Dry soil or a hungry plant sends them to flower too, and then the leaves turn bitter and growth stops.
What to do about it
In the months your lettuce bolts, grow one of these for your greens instead. Keep the soil moist and feed them.
The evidence
Evidence: checked against 6 sources in the research-based literature.
The 6 sources
When temperatures climb, amaranth and tropical spinaches are at their best.
This spinach will produce in weather too warm for other spinach varieties, but soil must be kept moist.
Malabar spinach thrives in hot, humid climates.
New Zealand spinach is heat and drought tolerant and does well in the warm summer/fall months when regular spinach will not produce.
Some people also eat the edible leaves of sweetpotato
Plants it applies to
How this rule has changed
Every change is dated, newest first. The full record, with each reason, is in the data download.
- A person read the sources and confirmed it
- Added to the rules
Cite this page
Milpa Gardens. "When lettuce and spinach bolt, summer greens keep growing." Evidence grade: A good hunch. https://milpa.garden/rules/months-place-s-lettuce-spinach-run-seed/
A garden planner built on graded evidence. Every claim states its evidence grade and links its sources on the page. Cite it with the grade, and add the date you read it.
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How we grade evidence
- Well established
- The rule names its mechanism and is settled, by sources a person has read and checked or by plain arithmetic and geometry.
- Promising
- The mechanism is named and the literature backs it. A few questions are still open.
- A good hunch
- Plausible by its mechanism, but field studies are thin, so treat it as a lean.
- Contested
- The evidence points both ways, or no study has tested it, so the planner does not enforce it.
- Refuted
- The claim did not survive its sources. It is kept so the folklore can be answered.