Ann's Air Gardens

I Like Basella More Every Day

I am cloning these as fast as I can because I want to eat more of them!  It is hard to have just one favorite plant, but this could be mine.  It has everything that I like!  Malabar Spinach loves hot weather and resists pests.  It is beautiful, vining, nutritious, tasty, and now I am seeing buds and diminutive flowers.  Stem cuttings root in plain water in ten days, and once the plants are cloned they can be left to grow in water, adding liquid nutrients on a schedule, or hardened off and planted in soil.  The fast growing vine will spread like ivy and cover a wall or a shed with edible landscaping. 

The plant pictured here is just growing in a glass of water near one of my LED AeroGarden planters.  I put a few clay pellets in the water to hold the stem upright.  It is not in an ebb and flow container, but every now and then I pour off the water and then pour the same water back into the glass to give the roots some air, and of course I top the water off every few days to keep the roots from drying out. 

Very Exciting Update on Malabar Spinach

More people need to know about this.  Malabar spinach is delicious, nutritious and grows fast.  I have been experimenting with different kinds of edible plants that can be grown indoors in water.  Malabar spinach seems to have the most potential by far of any of the plants I have tried so far. Sure, it is ideal to have a variety of different plants on hand to eat, but this one meets all of my demands:

Really good tasting

Attractive

Nutritious

Easy and fast to grow and propagate

Resistant to bugs, etc.

Grown from seed, it takes Malabar spinach about 70 days to mature (I almost threw my first seeds away because it was almost a month before they sprouted in my Easy Sprout gadget), but once my first plant was big enough to harvest, this cutting rooted in plain water in exactly 10 days:

So now I have zillions of them. In fact, Phase One of my Malabar Spinach experiment is almost finished and I can hardly wait to write it up.

Basella rubra

Ceylon or Malabar "spinach" is a somewhat  mucilaginous vining plant less known in the United States than in many other parts of the world. Highly nutritous,  it is also beautiful.  I haven't cooked any yet,  but eaten raw it strikes me as tasting like a combination of Swiss Chard,  okra,  and spinach.  

I like it because it is nutritionally dense,  easy to grow,  attractive,  heat loving,  and grows in water (or soil) .

 

This is the first time I have tried to grow Malabar Spinach, and it took a very long time to sprout and mature,  but now I think I am in love with this plant.   I put my first cutting in water today and am very interested in knowing how long it will take to sprout.   Florida Hillbilly says 10 days with Root Tone. Warning:  One could get lost for days in db's wonderful website! 

I can hardly wait to try growing Basella alba next.

Update:  In my experiment comparing rooting in  plain (filtered) water with cuttings of like size rooted with K-L-N Rooting Solution,  there was no difference in rooting time.