Featured Recipes: • Baked Penne Pasta with Lobster and Spinach • Goat Cheese Crisp Salad • Manfred’s Popeye & Olive Oil Sandwich • Savory Chicken Roll-ups • Spinach and Caramelized Onion Soufflé • Spinach with Raisins • Strawberry Spinach Salad • Tuscan Spinach with Raisins • Warm Bacon Dressing Gardening Tips: Cool Weather Spinach Summer gardeners miss out on the three seasons in which this tasty, nutritious green truly thrives. For fall spinach, wait until cool weather is just starting to settle in, but there are still enough frost-free days to bring the crop to maturity. For winter spinach, just protect it with a cold frame or--if your climate is mild--a layer of straw. The outer leaves may look beat-up in the dead of winter, but fresh new growth will continually appear at the center. For spring spinach, you can keep on harvesting these wintered-over plants, or start new ones from seed as soon as the soil can be worked. Another trick is to sow a late fall crop that will germinate just before the ground freezes up, then overwinter the young seedlings. (In cold climates, protect them with a cold frame.) They’ll start to grow as soon as spring arrives! Hail to the Hardy Greens Most garden greens can hardly wait for cool weather to come. They perk up and sweeten up as the mugginess of August fades away. Crops such as spinach, arugula, claytonia and mache, if protected by a cold frame or simple unheated greenhouse, survive the winter in cold climates, to be cut and re-cut for a continuous harvest. Sow them in September in the north, October in warmer parts of the country. They do best hunkering down, close to the earth. Lettuce and endive over-winter best when cut at baby leaf size rather than full-sized heads. Kale, collards and Brussels sprouts fare better if grown to full size and left outdoors to soldier on as long as they can, since they do not re-grow if cut back in winter. We can often harvest them for our Christmas table, even in snowy Maine.