Bolting over bounty

A couple weeks ago, virtually all of my spinach was bolting. "Bolting" means going to flower. When a leaf crop, such as spinach or lettuce, goes to flower, that's not a good thing, unless your purpose for growing them is to harvest the seeds rather than the leaves (in which case bolting is obviously imperative). Bolted lettuce and spinach leaves are more bitter and generally not marketable.

Heat is a factor that accelerates the flowering process, and my spinach spent most of its life span during the hottest days of May and June, so in a way it's no surprise that it bolted. I just wished they had grown a little bigger before going to flower. They were very slow-growing. I think part of it has to do with flat soil I sowed them in, which wasn't ideal and possibly retarded their growth. Also, I probably could have sowed them much earlier than I did and given them more of a chance to grow during the cooler weeks.

So for a while I had been picking off the flowering heads from all my spinach plants (which I had to do every day). But it was getting to the point where the leaves simply weren't becoming more abundant no matter what I did, so I harvested it all at once.

Much of my Simpson lettuce has also been bolting (though not quite as much), and I can only assume it's doing so for the same reasons my spinach did. I did the same thing for the lettuce as I did for the spinach, but ate the bolting heads because they seemed to be just leaves anyway (and they weren't noticeably bitter yet).

I sowed more spinach and lettuce seeds a few days ago, which I'll plant where my current lettuce resides after it's been harvested. I tried four different types of potting soil mixes - regular 1:1 mix (soil:compost), a 1:3 mix, a 100% compost mix, and a 1:1 mix that happened to have a bit more soil in it than compost. I'm curious to see what's most effective for germination and seedling growth. So far, the 1:1 mix is winning!