Olympia Spinach — The Upright Smooth-Leaf Hybrid for Volume Harvests
Olympia is the spinach to grow when you want quantity without a sink full of grit. It is an F1 hybrid with smooth to very lightly savoyed leaves held on stiff, upright stems, so the foliage never touches the soil — one rinse and it is ready. That single trait is why market growers reach for it: a full bed can be cut, washed, and bagged in the time a deeply crinkled savoy type takes to clean.
The rest of the package matches. Growth is fast and even, the flavour is mild and sweet with very little of spinach’s oxalic bite, and resistance to nine races of downy mildew makes it dependable in wet springs and humid falls where other varieties turn grey and collapse. Olympia is also unusually flexible in timing — cut at three weeks as baby leaf, or run it on to full size at seven. Being a hybrid, its seed will not come true, so it is grown for the crop rather than the seed harvest.
🇺🇸 US: Zones 3–9. Spring and fall through the North, Midwest and Mountain West; a fall-to-spring crop in the South and Gulf Coast, where downy mildew pressure is heaviest and this variety’s resistance matters most. Skip summer sowings outside high elevation.
Best for: High-volume harvests, baby-leaf salad beds, meal prep, smoothies, freezing, and gardens with wet, humid weather.
Direct sow 1 cm (½ in) deep, 4–6 weeks before last frost; repeat every 10–14 days for succession
Germinates from 4°C (40°F); ideal 7–21°C (45–70°F); fails above 25°C (77°F)
7–14 days in cool soil
Full leaf: 10 cm (4 in) apart · Baby leaf: 2–3 cm (1 in), no thinning
Full sun to part shade; rich, evenly moist soil at pH 6.5–7.0
Baby leaf from 21–28 days; full upright leaves from 45–50 days
🌱 How to Grow Olympia Spinach Seeds
Direct sow Olympia spinach seeds 1 cm (½ in) deep once soil reaches 4°C (40°F), 4–6 weeks before the last frost; leaves are ready for baby-leaf cutting in 21–28 days and full size in 45–50 days. The upright habit tolerates tighter spacing than sprawling savoy types without losing airflow, so a small bed produces a lot. Sow in succession rather than all at once — a fresh row every ten days keeps cutting continuous instead of delivering one glut before the heat arrives.
- Work 5 cm (2 in) of compost into the top 15 cm (6 in) of the bed and rake it level. Spinach feeds hard on nitrogen and wants a pH of 6.5–7.0.
- Sow the seeds 1 cm (½ in) deep in rows 30 cm (12 in) apart, dropping seed every 2–3 cm (1 in) along the row.
- Water in and keep the surface evenly moist until emergence. Seeds sitting in a dried crust will stall, and a patchy stand at this stage never fully recovers.
- Thin to 10 cm (4 in) apart for full-size plants once two true leaves show — closer than savoy types need, because the leaves grow up rather than out.
- Side-dress with fish emulsion or blood meal at the four-leaf stage, then again three weeks later if leaves pale. Fast growth is what keeps the flavour mild.
- Give 2.5–4 cm (1–1.5 in) of water per week on a steady schedule. Drought followed by a soaking is the fastest way to trigger bolting and bitterness.
- Sow the fall crop 6–8 weeks before your first frost, and a further sowing 3–4 weeks after that under cover for a late, slow-growing cut.
Downy mildew is what makes or breaks a spinach crop in a wet spring, and Olympia’s resistance to nine races of it is the practical reason to choose this variety over an heirloom in a humid garden. The disease shows as pale yellow blotches on the leaf top with grey-purple fuzz underneath, and it spreads fastest in cool, damp, still air. Even with a resistant variety, water at soil level rather than overhead, give the plants room to dry, and rotate spinach out of a bed that has carried it two years running. Spinach leaf miner is the other regular visitor — a floating row cover from sowing shuts it out completely.
🥬 Growing Olympia Spinach as Baby Leaf
Sow Olympia spinach seeds thickly — roughly 2 cm (¾ in) apart in wide 8 cm (3 in) bands — and cut the whole band at 21–28 days, when leaves are 8–10 cm (3–4 in) tall. Baby-leaf spinach is a different crop from full-size spinach, not just an earlier harvest, and Olympia is one of the better varieties for it: the leaves come up uniform, smooth, and clean, with tender stems that do not need stripping.
Cut with scissors about 3 cm (1 in) above the soil, leaving the growing points intact, and most bands give a second cut ten to fourteen days later. Yields drop with each pass, so plan on two cuts and then resow. This is the method that turns a small raised bed or a 20 cm (8 in) deep container into a steady salad supply — and because a baby-leaf crop finishes in under a month, it slots into a garden year in gaps too short for anything else.
🍃 Harvesting & Storing Olympia Spinach
Full-size Olympia is ready at 45–50 days, when the rosette stands 15–20 cm (6–8 in) and the outer leaves are the size of a hand. The upright structure is a real advantage here: the leaves stand clear of the soil, so cutting is fast, clean, and free of the mud splash that fouls sprawling varieties after rain. Pick the outer leaves and leave the crown, and the plant keeps producing for three to five weeks.
The signal to clear the bed is the crown lifting and the new leaves coming through narrow and pointed rather than rounded — flavour turns bitter within days of that change. Unwashed leaves keep 7–10 days in a sealed bag in the crisper. For freezing, blanch 90 seconds, ice-bath, squeeze dry and pack in portions; smooth-leaf spinach freezes into neat, compact blocks and holds 8–12 months, which is why Olympia is a favourite for anyone putting up a winter supply.
🍳 Cooking with Olympia Spinach
Mild, sweet, low in oxalic acid, and almost never gritty — Olympia is the easy spinach in the kitchen. Baby leaves go straight into salads and grain bowls with no stem-stripping, and the flavour is quiet enough to disappear into a fruit smoothie, where a 30–40 g (1 oz) handful adds vitamin K, folate and iron without changing the taste. Whole large leaves wilt cleanly into pasta, dal, soups and eggs.
The smooth leaf does give up a little in one department: it holds a vinaigrette less well than a crinkled savoy type, so dress it lightly and just before serving. Cooking still pays a nutritional dividend — heat breaks down the oxalic acid that binds iron and calcium in raw leaves, making both easier to absorb.
🫙 Saving Olympia Spinach Seeds
Olympia is an F1 hybrid, so seed saved from it will not come true — the next generation segregates into a mix of plants with none of the parent’s uniformity, upright habit, or downy mildew resistance. Hybrid does not mean genetically modified: Olympia is a conventional cross between two spinach parent lines, and the seed is non-GMO. It simply means the variety is bought fresh each season rather than perpetuated in the garden.
To save spinach seed, grow an open-pollinated variety instead. Spinach is dioecious — every plant is male or female — so keep at least 6–10 plants of one variety, let them bolt, and strip the seed once it dries brown and papery on the stalk. Because spinach is wind-pollinated with pollen that drifts for kilometres, only one variety can be allowed to flower at a time unless the plantings are isolated by roughly 1.5 km (1 mile). Test any saved seed on a damp paper towel before sowing; well-dried spinach seed stays viable 3–5 years in cool, dark, dry storage.
