HOW TO GROW MALABAR SPINACH

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 are 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 are growing this in July which is the summer season and Malabar spinach is a summer type of spinach it's not a winter vegetable it's a summer vegetable and you can see that when 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 a 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 five to six feet easily and you can see that after about 36 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 wine out and try to use the support of the trellis that he 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 wines this is one more way to harvest Malabar spinach you trim down the wines and then you'll use all the leaves that are growing along the wine and that will you keep the plant down to sizeable 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 perennial II but I realized that the best option was to grow it every year so I just saved 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 newer 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 the spinach variety we'll see you again soon happy gardening