Courtesy of Wally S., Wally’s Urban Market Garden, Saskatoon SK
We always get asked if SPIN can work in (name your location here). We always reply that  SPIN is not place-based. No matter what zone, or country you are in, as long as you are approaching growing as a business, SPIN has something to offer. For instance, this question was just posted in our forum:
Hey everybody! Greetings from New Orleans! It’s hot but I have a feeling it is where most of yawl are too 🙂 A chef just asked us to grow parsley for him, and I’m wondering.. anybody know how much square footage it would take to grow 10 lbs weekly?
Well, right now the temperature here in Sas is 68 °, and where this guy’s at it is 89 °. But I’m growing parsley too. So to answer his question I just harvested one parsley plant and made some rough calculations to get him in the ball park. Here’s what I told told him:
It will probably take about 20 plants to give you a pound. So you would need around 200 plants to give you 10 lbs. You can fit about 200 transplants into a three row standard SPIN bed.
Once you harvest a plant, you need two to three weeks before another harvest of that plant. Since you are targeting weekly production, you’ll need more than one bed. To play it safe I would say if you had around 5 standard beds in parsley, that should give you what you need. Five standard beds would take up a space of around 400 sq. ft.
Best way to seed parsley is to use plug trays. Start them in the trays, and then transplant. So try planting around ten 96 cell plug trays. Won’t take you long and easy to manage. And won’t cost you much.
Maybe some day I’ll get down to NOLA and and this guy can take me to the restaurant where I can taste what they’re doing with that parsley Round about when it’s -25 ° here will be a good time to work that in.
