GROWING LONGEVITY SPINACH
longevity spinach or gynura procumbens is one plant you must grow in your
garden and we have a delicious spinach recipe for you as well
the longevity spinach is an edible vine found in China Southeast Asia and Africa
it's just now beginning to gain popularity in the United States due to
its massive health benefits the health benefits of the longevity
spinach include keeping blood sugar levels under control which is good for
people with diabetes it helps reduce bad cholesterol and it keeps blood pressure
under normal levels so with these kind of health benefits longevity spinach
becomes one of the healthiest vegetables that you can eat so I would highly
recommend that you try and grow this in your home garden now let's look at the
planting technique to plant our longevity spinach we're going to be
using our potting mix our ez potting mix that we discussed in our previous video
I'm not going to go over the details but it's basically the recipe that you see
on your screen here and this forms a very well draining mix that the
longevity spinach will grow excellent in the plant that we have purchased is from
a local garden store and it's very easy to propagate this plant which we will
see in the later section of the video and once you plant it it can grow either
in full Sun or in partial Sun as well mine is growing in partial Sun and it's
growing really well and within just a few days about a week after planting
this plant was ready for harvest and now let's look at the harvest to harvest our
longevity spinach all we do is snip the stems that are growing outwards and that
not only helps us control the shape of the plant it also gives us a good
harvest so as you can see here we're just chopping away the leaves from the
sides and if you want you can even harvest the individual leaves but I just
found that this harvesting method helps me not only harvest the spinach but also
give a nice look to this plant and if you've not already noticed this plant is
also very good-looking it serves excellent as an ornamental plant which
is a big plus for your garden and once you
the spinach you need enough to prepare the kind of dish that you are preparing
now I usually steam them and then puree them into a dish and I will be sharing
that recipe with you towards the end of this video but overall I found this
spinach variety to be an abundant producer and it just keeps growing and
producing these leaves which are just loaded with nutrition so as you can see
here extremely healthy leaves and once you start harvesting the longevity
spinach you can just keep harvesting it for quite some time and here you can
take a closer look at the harvested leaves they look absolutely fresh
absolutely delicious now longevity spinach grows excellent in
partial Sun about four hours of sunlight a day and as you can see here ours has
been growing along our side yard in this little patio area and it has produced
excellent leaves I have no complaints of the quality of the leaves that it's
producing and it's also excellent to eat and now let's look at the propagation
technique for longevity spinach I am gonna be snipping some of these tips
which are growing outwards and we will be propagating the spinach using this
technique all we need is just a few stems and then what we will do is take
these stems and then plant them in a potting mix and they should be able to
grow into full plants so as you can see here we have some containers with some
potting mix and all we really do is just loosen up the soil and then plant these
stems into the soil and since the longevity spinach is actually a wild
growing plant it will easily send out roots and develop into a new plant so if
you have somebody around your friends your neighbors that has a longevity
spinach plant you can just takes a few stems and start propagating it it's an
excellent way to propagate the longevity spinach
very soon we were able to harvest one more round of the longevity spinach as
you can see here the plant after harvesting has grown back and it's grown
a lot more twigs a lot more leaves around the plant and this time when I'm
harvesting I also harvested a lot of the large leaves and this gave a lot of room
and a lot of air to the plant which is very important for it to grow well and
now for a quick spinach recipe now a lot of you have asked me what do I do with
all the harvest that we have in our garden so I thought of including a
recipe whenever possible so that I can share with you what exactly do I do once
we harvest all the produce from our garden so the spinach being an extremely
healthy and plant that's loaded with nutrition the best way to prepare this
is either to steam it or stir-fry it and that would give you the best nutrients
in this case what we will be doing is chopping up our spinach leaves into just
a little smaller size so that it's more manageable and what we're going to do is
make a steamed spinach puree which is not only extremely delicious but also
very healthy so for this we start chopping up our spinach into smaller
pieces and you'll soon see why now if you have a larger container you don't
really need to chop the leaves you can still steam them as is but we are
chopping them up so that it's easier to manage these small sized leaves when we
eventually cook them now we will take a pan and add some water to this pan this
will be used to cook our spinach leaves and inside the water are we going to be
adding some salt you just need to add as much as you need and some tumeric powder
now it's better to add the salt and turmeric powder while you are boiling
your spinach leaves you can add it later as well but I just find that these
finish leaves absorb a lot of flavor when cooked like this and you will now
add your spinach leaves to that water that you just
created the water with the turmeric and salt and then you just mix it in very
well so that the leaves are well mixed with the water
and once that is done you can just close the lid and then let the spinach leaves
cook and after a few minutes you will see that the spinach leaves start
decreasing in size as they're cooking so all you do is just mix them more and
then just cover the lid and cook them for some more time and eventually you
will keep doing this for about 10 minutes or so and eventually once your
spinach cooks to this consistency that you're seeing here you can remove the
spinach leaves and now you're ready for the next step and the next step what we
will be doing is just taking a sieve and then you need to strain your spinach
leaves so that you only get the leaves and just save the water you will need
the water later on so just save the water and you will be able to use it in
the next step in the next step we're going to be using a blender we will use
a blender to puree these leaves and you can just add it to the blender and then
just run it at the first three speeds make a nice puree like you see here in a
pan you can just take some oil and into the oil you can add some mustard seeds
cumin seeds and optionally some red chillies now if you want to make it a
little spicy you can add the red chillies or you can skip it and once the
mustard seeds start sputtering optionally you can add some green
chillies and curry leaves you are ready to add the pureed spinach that you
prepared in the previous step and then just add it to this mix and just stir it
for some time within about a minute or so your delicious longevity spinach
puree is ready now if you want to drink it like a soup you can add some more
water and dilute it so that it's not very pungent I like to eat my spinach
puree with rice or Proteus and that's how I like to eat it and it's very delicious
so there we have it folks that was our episode on growing the longevity
as well as the recipe if you liked this episode do give us a thumbs up and I
would like to know from you whether you are interested in growing such
interesting medicinal and healthy plants in your home garden - let me know in the
comments box below we'll see you again soon happy gardening
