Malabar Spinach 2/20/17

Is Malabar really spinach? No..it's from a different plant group all together:species = basella rubra. However it tastes like spinach, it cooks like spinach. It offers generally the same great nutritional value as many other garden varieties of spinach. Malabar is a great warm to hot weather plant for Arizona.. It can take the heat, much like Egyptian Spinach.

It comes in either a green or red stem variety, And like Egyptian Spinach, Malabar is a vine climber. I prefer red stem variety for the higher antioxidant value. I would strongly recommend growing both Malabar and Egyptian as part of your garden greens.

Malabar spinach grows eight to ten feet tall and wide and produces inconspicuous white-tinged pink flowers in its leaf axils. Upon fertilization, the flowers develop into small, highly ornamental, single-seeded purple berries. The juice from the berries is so intensely purple that it puts beet juice to shame.

Malabar is not too finicky about it's soil, just lightly moist. It matures around 50 days out.

Seeds are a little pricey, but you generally get a pretty good germination rate, and once you get a plant or two going, you should have your own seed source from that point forward. Note that you can take cuttings from Malabar and get new plants growing.