Not My Normal Spinach

I came home the other day and my landlady was in the backyard working on her garden. She’s been really into the whole gardening thing this summer and has made the back yard so pretty. There are flowers I don’t know the name of, bushes I can’t identify, and a whole section of vegetables that are flourishing.

She offered me kale, which I politely declined. She then offered me spinach and I figured why not. I like spinach, it’ll save me needing to buy some, and it would help her out – something about needing to cut it before it flowers *shrug*

Uh yeah…this is what I was given…

My spinach experience is limited to buying baby spinach from the produce section of the grocery store, or buying the frozen blocks of spinach meant to be added in to soups and things.

Spinach fresh from a garden is apparently weird, and kinda creepy, looking.

I’m not completely sure what to do with it, so far I have stared at it in confusion, put it on the counter for a day while I dealt with other things, then moved it to the fridge because it seemed to be wilting, as you can see in the above picture.

I guess I’ll chop off the leaves and use it like the baby spinach that I normally buy?

I suppose if I had ever taken the time to think about where my baby spinach came from and what it looked like before being cleaned and put in packaging so it could be shipped to a grocery store I might have googled it and seen what it looked like in a more natural state. But what spinach that hasn’t been packaged for sale looks like was never high on my list, or even on my list at all, so it was never a thing I looked in to.

Makes me wonder what other vegetables I eat look different in their fresh from the garden condition vs sitting on the grocery store shelf…I mean, I don’t wonder enough to start googling vegetables, lol, but it’s something to think about on a quiet day, when there is nothing else to do. 😉

Tags: baby spinach, food, food confuses me, gardening, grocery store, produce, spinach, vegetables, what is this