Malabar Spinach

Not spinach at all, but a tropical climbing vine that thrives in exactly the heat that makes true spinach bolt. Thick succulent leaves, a slight okra-like slipperiness, a six-foot trellis, and a harvest that runs from July to frost.

Nick and soak the hard seed, sow into genuinely warm soil, and set the trellis on day one. Rich moist ground, full sun, and patience until real heat arrives - it does nothing until it is warm and then it does everything.

Two things decide whether this crop works: seed treatment and soil temperature. The seed has a hard coat and a reputation for never coming up. Nick it with a nail file or rub it on sandpaper, soak it 24 hours in warm water, and sow it half an inch deep into soil that is genuinely above 70°F — 75-85°F is what it wants. Even then, give it 10 to 21 days. Sown into cool spring soil it simply rots or sits.

In zones 8 and warmer, direct-sow after the soil warms. Further north, start seed indoors on a heat mat four to six weeks before the last frost and transplant two to four weeks after it, once nights hold above 55-60°F. Resist the calendar here: a Malabar set out too early sits motionless for a month, and a plant put out two weeks later will overtake it.

Give it full sun (part shade is fine in the deep South), rich soil with plenty of compost, and steady moisture — heat tolerance is not drought tolerance. Space plants 8 to 12 inches along a support and put that support up at planting time: netting, a cattle panel, a fence, an obelisk, anything six feet or more. It twines and climbs on its own with no tying in. Two or three plants feed a household. It also grows very well in a large container with a tall trellis, on a hot patio where nothing else wants to be.

Pinch the leader early to force side shoots, keep it watered, feed lightly, and keep cutting. Pinch off flower spikes to extend the leaf harvest, and pick the berries before they drop and stain everything.

The one shaping job is early: pinch out the growing tip when the vine is about 18 inches tall. That forces side shoots low down where you can reach them. An unpinched plant sends one bare stem to the top of the trellis and makes you harvest on tiptoe.

After that the care is watering, feeding, and picking. Water deeply two or three times a week in heat and mulch the root zone — drought is what turns the leaves small, dark and tough and pushes the vine into flower. A light nitrogen feed every two or three weeks keeps the regrowth fast and tender, because you are cutting this plant hard all summer. Picking is the pruning: the more shoot tips you take, the bushier and more productive it gets.

Late in the season it throws small pink-white flower spikes followed by glossy black-purple berries. Pinch the spikes off if you want to keep the leaf harvest going. If you let them ripen, know what you are getting: the berry juice is an intense magenta dye that stains hands, clothing, decking, paving and grout, and in zone 9 and warmer the fallen seed produces a crop of volunteers next spring. Neither is a disaster — volunteers are free plants, and the dye is a fine kitchen experiment — but site the trellis over soil or lawn rather than over pale patio stone.

Pests are refreshingly few. Slugs go for young seedlings, aphids sometimes gather on the growing tips, and spider mites appear in hot, dry, still air. Once the vine is climbing strongly it mostly looks after itself.

Cut 6-8 inch shoot tips every three or four days, just above a leaf node - two new shoots break from each cut. Harvest hard and often; the plant responds to cutting by getting bushier.

Harvest Malabar the way you harvest basil, not the way you harvest lettuce. Cut the top 6 to 8 inches of a shoot just above a leaf node, and take the leaves and the tender stem together — the stem is good eating. Two new shoots break from the node below the cut, so every harvest doubles the number of growing points, and a plant cut every three or four days becomes a dense curtain of leaves.

You can also just pick individual large leaves, and they are perfectly good cooked, but tip-cutting keeps the plant productive and stops it running away up the trellis. Once the vine reaches the top of its support, cut it back hard rather than letting it flop over — a heavy cut brings a flush of tender new growth within a week or two.

Harvest runs from roughly 50-70 days after sowing until the first frost, which ends it in a single night. Pick in the morning if you can; the leaves are less limp and keep better. Expect the harvest to slow once flowering starts, and to pick up again after you pinch the spikes off.

Thick leaves hold up better than spinach - about five days unwashed in the fridge. Blanch and freeze the surplus, or root a cutting in water and keep a plant alive on a windowsill all winter.

The thick, waxy leaves keep noticeably better than true spinach. Store shoot tips unwashed in a bag or container in the crisper with a paper towel to catch condensation, and expect four or five days in good condition — longer than spinach, which turns to slime in half that time. Do not wash until you cook: surface water is what starts the rot. Wilted tips revive in a cold-water soak, and you can also stand cut shoots in a glass of water on the counter for a day or two like herbs.

For a surplus, blanch briefly, squeeze out the water, and freeze in portions for soups and curries — the mucilage means it freezes and reheats into stews particularly well. It does not dry into anything useful.

The best kind of storage for this plant, though, is a living one. Take a few 6-inch cuttings in late summer, strip the lower leaves, and stand them in a jar of water on a windowsill; they root in about a week. Pot them up and you have a Malabar plant through the winter and free plants to set out next spring — which is how most people who grow it stop buying seed.

Mild and spinach-like in flavor, slippery like okra in texture. Fast high heat and a squeeze of acid minimize the mucilage; long simmering uses it deliberately to thicken dals, soups and stews.

Everything about cooking Malabar spinach comes back to its mucilage — the same slipperiness okra has. You can fight it or use it, and both are correct.

To minimize it: cook fast and hot. A wok or a wide skillet over high heat with garlic, ginger, a little oil and 60 seconds of stir-frying gives you a glossy, mild, very spinach-like green with almost no slip. Acid helps too — lime, tamarind, vinegar or tomato — which is why so many traditional preparations include one. Young leaves in a salad are only slightly slippery and perfectly pleasant raw, though this is not a plant to build a whole raw salad around.

To use it: simmer it. Filipino alugbati soups, Bengali pui shak, Indian dals, West African stews and Chinese soups all lean on that body, and it thickens a pot the way okra does without any starch. It is excellent stirred into lentils, folded into coconut curries, wilted into eggs, or added to a brothy soup in the last minutes.

Two practical notes. The stems are good eating — slice them a little thinner than the leaves and give them a head start in the pan. And the red-stemmed form bleeds a pink-purple into pale dishes; lovely in a stir-fry, less so in a cream soup.

Exceptionally high in vitamin A, plus vitamin C, folate, iron, calcium and magnesium - and, like true spinach, high in oxalates, so cook it and vary your greens.

Nutritionally Malabar spinach earns its place. It is very high in vitamin A (as beta-carotene), a strong source of vitamin C, folate, iron, calcium, magnesium and potassium, and low in calories, and it delivers all that in the middle of summer when most leafy greens have long since bolted. The mucilage itself is soluble fiber.

The caveat is the same one true spinach carries: it is high in oxalates, which bind some of the calcium and iron it contains and which matter to anyone prone to calcium-oxalate kidney stones. Cooking reduces oxalate somewhat and is the normal way to eat this plant anyway. The practical advice is unremarkable — cook most of it, do not eat enormous raw quantities daily, rotate it with lower-oxalate greens like lettuce, mache or Asian brassicas, and pair it with something acidic for better iron uptake.

Seed that never came up was not soaked or the soil was cold. A plant doing nothing in June is waiting for heat. Slimy texture is normal - cook it hotter and faster. Purple stains mean the berries dropped.

Nothing germinated: the two usual causes are an untreated hard seed coat and cold soil. Nick and soak the seed, wait for 70°F+ soil or use a heat mat, and allow up to three weeks. The plant sat there doing nothing for a month: normal — it was set out too early and is waiting for warm nights. It will take off the week the heat arrives and outgrow anything you replace it with.

Leaves are small, dark and tough: drought stress, or the plant is flowering. Water deeply and consistently, mulch, feed lightly, and pinch off the flower spikes. One bare stem shot to the top of the trellis: it was never pinched — cut it back hard and the side shoots will come. Too slimy: not a fault, it is the plant. Cook it fast over high heat, add acid, or lean into it and use it to thicken a soup.

Purple stains on the patio, on hands, on the laundry: the ripe berries. Strip flower spikes before they set, or grow the vine over soil rather than paving. Seedlings everywhere next spring: self-sowing from dropped berries, common in zone 9 and warmer — pull, transplant or give them away. Yellow lower leaves: usually nitrogen shortage on a hard-cut plant, sometimes waterlogging. Fine pale stippling and webbing in a heatwave: spider mites — hose the foliage down, undersides included.

A tropical plant that needs heat and humidity to shine: outstanding in zones 8-11, worth starting indoors in zones 5-7, and frustrating in cool maritime summers. Frost ends it in one night.

Zones 9-11: Malabar spinach is at home. It grows fast, may run for years without frost, and self-sows freely from dropped berries — expect volunteers and pull the ones you do not want. It is the summer green that works when the Gulf and Deep South are too hot and humid for anything else in the salad bed. Zones 8-9: excellent from June to frost; direct-sow once the soil is warm.

Zones 5-7: entirely worth growing, but start seed indoors on a heat mat and transplant well after the last frost. You will harvest from midsummer until the first freeze, and the plant is only really productive during the hottest six or eight weeks. Cool maritime summers (coastal Pacific Northwest, coastal New England, the higher Mountain West) are the hard case: without sustained warmth the vine crawls rather than climbs. Grow it against a hot south wall, in a black container on paving, or in a greenhouse or tunnel, where it does very well.

Everywhere, frost ends the plant overnight — there is no hardening it off. Take cuttings in late summer if you want to keep a plant going.

Cuttings root in a jar of water in about a week, which makes this the easiest vegetable in the garden to multiply and to overwinter. Seed comes from the purple berries and stays viable for years.

Cuttings are the easy route. Snip a 6-inch shoot, strip the lower leaves, and stand it in a glass of water on a bright windowsill; roots appear in about a week and it can be potted up straight away. Do this in late summer and you carry a plant through the winter indoors, then take cuttings off that plant in spring for the garden. It works just as well straight into moist potting mix.

Seed: let a few flower spikes set and ripen to glossy black-purple. Squeeze or mash the berries (wear gloves, or accept purple fingers for a week), rinse the pulp away, and dry the seeds thoroughly before storing them cool and dry — they stay viable four or five years. Malabar is self-pollinating and there is essentially nothing to cross with in a North American garden, so saved seed comes true. Remember the hard coat when you sow it again: nick and soak.

In warm zones the plant does this for you. Fallen berries produce a flush of volunteers the following spring, which can be thinned, transplanted or hoed off according to taste.

A staple leaf vegetable across tropical Asia and Africa for millennia, grown in the American South as an ornamental vine long before it was eaten here - and long used as a dye and a writing ink.

Basella alba has been cultivated across tropical Asia for thousands of years and is a daily vegetable from India and Bangladesh (pui shak) through Southeast Asia, the Philippines (alugbati), southern China (saan choy) and much of tropical Africa. Its English name comes from the Malabar coast of southwestern India, and the plant is documented in Chinese agricultural writing well over a thousand years ago.

The berries have their own history. The intense magenta juice was used as a food coloring, a fabric dye and an ink across Asia, and that ornamental quality is how the plant first arrived in American gardens — nineteenth and twentieth-century seed catalogs sold the red-stemmed form as a decorative vine for arbors and porches, and many gardeners grew it for years without knowing it was food.

It has come back as a vegetable in the United States largely through immigrant gardeners and through the search for a green that survives a Southern summer, which is precisely the gap it fills. Today it appears in American seed catalogs on both pages at once: in the vegetables as Ceylon or vine spinach, and in the ornamentals as red-stemmed Basella.