an easy to grow healthy and delicious
spinach variety that can be eaten raw or cooked
let's look at growing Malabar spinach
so we grew our Malabar spinach in July and
we're growing this in a whiskey barrel
container here as you can see with some supports
Malabar spinach is a vining
spinach variety so it needs some support
to grow and you can see that we're
growing this in july which is the summer
season and malabar spinach is a summer
type of spinach it's not a winter
vegetable its a summer vegetable and you
can see that we are harvesting the
leaves you can start harvesting leaves from your
Malabar spinach quite early in the
growing season as and when you need them
and regular spinach grows better in the
cooler season but Malabar spinach
actually grows very well in the summers
and as you can see here the leaves are
quite fleshy and malabar spinach can be
eaten raw; when eaten raw, it has a little
peppery taste very much unlike spinach
if you're eating them as a salad but if you cook
them they taste like regular spinach
and 30 days since planting you can see
that the vines have grown bigger
and malabar spinach does need some
support it will grow to about 5 to 6
feet easily
and you can see that after about thirty
six days the plants have grown quite
dense and they will continue to grow
this way
and as far as fertilizer goes Malabar
spinach needs a lot of nitrogen rich
fertilizers so we have used all-purpose
organic fertilizer mixed into the soil
as well as a lot of manure chicken
manure to provide a lot of nitrogen to
the plant to produce these nice big
fleshy leaves that you can see here
and that's what you want to do
you want the plant to produce a lot
of dense leaves fleshy leaves that you
can use to eat raw as well as cooked
now most health food stores will also
sell Malabar spinach stores like whole
foods for example because Malabar
spinach is very healthy and the reason
it's healthy is because it provides a
lot of protein for the amount of
calories that you consume and that's a
very good thing for health enthusiasts
because they try to get in a lot of
protein as much as possible from what
they eat so Malabar spinach is a great
vegetarian protein option
and fifty days since planting you can see that the vines
have grown even larger and they will
continue to vine out and try to use the
support or the trellis that we provided
for these plants and our trellis is almost six
foot high and you can see that the plant
has covered almost the entire distance
along the trellis now you can also just
harvest Malabar spinach by trimming down
the vines this is one more way to
harvest Malabar spinach you trim down
the vines and then you use all the
leaves that are growing along the vine
and that way you keep the plant down to
sizable proportions as well
and you can see that by the end of the
summer season the Malabar spinach will
start producing flowers which you can
see in this video right here and these
white flowers will eventually turn into
seed so as you can see here after about
110 days which is pretty much
towards the end of the Malabar spinach
season you can see a lot of seeds the
black seeds that the plant produces and
these will fall down and produce even
more plants
and if you have warmer winters in your
area you can always grow Malabar spinach
as a perennial which means you can keep
growing it over and over again I usually
like to grow Malabar spinach as an
annual I used to grow it perennially but
I realized that the best option was to
grow it every year so i just save the
seeds from the plant as you can see here
you can just easily harvest the seeds
you can even dry them that's perfectly
fine or you can just plant them this way
and they will grow into new plants in
the next season and now for an easy
Malabar spinach fritters recipe
so there we have it folks that was our
episode on growing the Malabar spinach
do let me know if you have tried
growing this spinach variety or are you
planning to try growing this spinach variety
we'll see you again soon
happy gardening