All About Orach - a Fantastic Vegetable for Your Garden
Have you heard of orach? How about mountain spinach? Both are the same plant. Orach is a fantastic annual vegetable that is a great addition to any garden. I just love growing it and I wanted to share with you all a bit about orach in this week's blog post - Growing Orach – What You Need to Know
The post is broken into the following sections:
- What is Orach? (And Why You Should Grow It)
- Basics of Planting Orach
- Harvesting and Using Orach
- Get started With Orach
Have you grown orach? Please share you experience with it if you have!
Why I Love Orach
One of the fun reasons why I love orach is that it is a very colorful vegetable. It does come in green but there are also dark and bright red versions, some that are a mix of pink and green, plus some that are a yellow green. Having them all mixed together is really great and adds some fun colors to the garden.
It really stands out against all the green that a garden normally has.
But as a wild homesteader the biggest reason I love growing orach is how easy it is. Even when young orach rarely has any issues with pests (at least in my area). Slugs just leave it alone which here in western Washington is just awesome!
Orach is also very heat tolerant and it is great having a green that I can harvest all summer long.
I really like spinach but have always struggled with growing it without it bolting early. With orach I get a vegetable that tastes very similar and can be used just like spinach but that can also handle the heat.
The only potential downside of growing orach is how big it gets. Orach can get up to 10 feet tall but most of the time it tops out around 5 feet. Plus it gets big leaves so if you are not careful it can shade out a lot of other plants in your garden.
But you can also design with this in mind and use orach as a mini-hedgerow to block winds or provide afternoon shade. So it is both a plus and a minus in my book.
What About You
Does orach sound interesting to you? If so make sure to check out the blog post which has more information about orach.
So have you grown orach? If not does it sound like something you would be interested in growing? Please leave a comment sharing your thoughts on growing orach.
Thank you!
Weekly Blog Post
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I have been hearing a lot about this plant lately. I may have to source some seed for next year. Thanks for the write-up! Good work.
Following
:-)
Thank you! :) Yeah, it is becoming popular again. Seeds are cheap and tend to have very good germination rates in my experience.
Nice information! Is this growing in foresty earth?
Thank you! :) Orach does best in good soil so I think forest soil would likely work fine. I have grown it in nice dark rich soil and in some poor soils and it tends to do fine in either though it does grow bigger in richer soil.