Orach (Mountain Spinach)

Sow seed about a half inch to an inch deep in rows roughly 2 feet apart, as soon as the ground is workable in spring. Grow it much as you would garden spinach. Orach is a cool-season vegetable that is quick to bolt once summer heat arrives, so the tender leaves you actually eat are the ones it builds while the weather is still cool. It outlasts true spinach in heat, but it does not outlast it forever.

Orach seedlings move well, so you can start plants indoors and set them out, or lift and reset seedlings you pull while thinning. Set them 6 to 12 inches apart in rows about 2 feet apart. UF/IFAS states plainly that orach seedlings may be transplanted, which is not true of every cool-season green. That lets growers in short-season zones start the crop under cover and get picking sooner in the narrow cool window, and it means the seedlings you pull while thinning are worth resetting instead of discarding.

Thin seedlings to stand 6 to 12 inches apart in the row once they are big enough to handle. The thinnings are edible leaves, so eat them rather than composting them. A single orach plant develops a stout, angular, branching stem 5 to 6 feet tall. Left at seeding density the plants stay spindly, shade each other, and give small leaves instead of the broad soft ones worth picking.

Once plants are up, turn leaves over regularly and look for clusters of 4 to 8 white eggs on the undersides, and for pale blotches that later turn brown. Pick off and destroy egg-bearing or mined leaves as you find them, and pull lambsquarters and other chenopod weeds nearby. Spinach leafminer attacks crops and weeds in the Chenopodiaceae, the family orach belongs to, and lambsquarters growing nearby feeds the flies that then find your row. The larva feeds between the leaf surfaces where nothing sprayed on the outside reaches it, so catching eggs before they hatch is the control that actually works.

Lay a fine-mesh row cover over the bed at sowing or transplanting and seal the edges down to the soil. Only cover ground that did not grow orach, beets, chard, or spinach last year. Because you are eating leaves and orach is wind-pollinated, the cover can stay on all season. The adult leafminer is a fly that overwinters as a pupa in the soil, emerges in spring, and must land on a leaf to lay her eggs. A sealed cover stops her outright, which matters because once the larvae are inside the leaf they cannot be reached. Covering ground that held a host crop last year backfires, since the pupae emerge underneath the cover.

Leaves and the tender attached stems are ready roughly 40 to 60 days after seeding. Pick leaves as you want them rather than cutting the whole plant down, and use them as a cooking green. Orach is picked leaf by leaf like spinach, and the leaves are best while they are still slightly crimped, soft, and pliable. They toughen as the plant shifts out of its leaf rosette and into a seed stalk that can reach 8 feet.

In hot-summer, mild-winter regions, sow from early fall onward instead of in spring. UF/IFAS sows orach in Florida from mid-September through February, and from October through January in the southern half of the state. Orach's season is the cool one, whenever that lands in your climate. In the Deep South and the low desert a spring sowing runs into bolting heat within a few weeks, while a fall sowing gets months of the mild weather the plant actually wants.

When picking is over, pull and destroy the spent plants instead of leaving residue standing over winter. Do not turn the bed now: wait and plow it deeply in early spring, before the flies emerge, to destroy overwintered material from last season. Move next season's orach, beets, chard, and spinach to different ground. Leafminers spend the winter as pupae in the soil and in the debris of the crop they fed on, and the first generation in spring is the one that does the most damage. Clearing the residue takes away the debris they overwinter in; the deep tillage does its work in early spring, timed to disrupt the pupae just before that first flight rather than months ahead of it. Rotating away from chenopod hosts breaks the cycle from the other side.