Try the Seed Exchange forum here.

Dave

daninthedirt - I'm in Southeast Michigan; from what I've read they can be very successfully grown here as an annual. Would you be willing to share some seeds with me? I would be happy to senf you a SASE.

Dave - Thanks for the suggestion. I did, no one from there has answered me yet.

Message me with your address, and I will send. You need to turn on messaging on your Houzz profile page so I can message back. Of course, what I will send is *last years* seeds. You might want to wait until fall and get *this years* seeds.

These seeds were collected off the plant, and not off the ground, so one has to assume that they were mature. As I said, I never planted any of these, because this spring I had a huge number of volunteers from fallen seeds.

Got them, Dan; thank you! And thank you for the advice. As far as the scarifying and soaking, I am actually going to try wintersowing some of them. You sent me such a generous amount that if that doesn't work I'll have plenty left to play with when spring comes. Really appreciate it!

I have to say that when I've tried to seed these indoors, my germination rate was poor. That after soaking/scarifying, etc. So I was astonished to see hordes of them (that were not soaked or scarified) come up as volunteers. I had a hundred come up where I only needed a half dozen or so. Major thinning required. I think it's a matter of "soaking" in the soil for months. In that sense, winter sowing might be useful.

But remember that these are tropical plants. Hard to imagine that stratification is helpful, as it often is to non-tropical seeds. So the value of winter sowing would be just soaking them in the soil for a long time, rather than chilling. I have no idea what freezing temps do to these seeds outside. My outdoor temps don't get much below freezing and, protected in the soil, I'm sure they never freeze.

In my blistering summer conditions, malabar spinach has become my go-to salad green.

daninthedirt,

Would you be kind enough to share some of your Malabar spinach seeds with me. I can even do a trade with you for my hot peppers, lots of species to name here.

Ty!!!

Can do, but afterward, I'll be down to my personal need. (Although I'll probably get a flock of volunteers, and again may not really need any seeds.) So no more requests, please. These things produce seeds like crazy (most of which end up on the ground, hence the volunteers) and I have a zillion unripe green ones right now. So at the end of the year I'll make a point of harvesting a larger number.

I assume everyone knows that red malabar spinach seeds are readily available from several seed vendors online? Johnny's, Baker Creek, Park Seed, Seed Savers, Burpee's, etc.?

Dave

Yeah, I said that in the beginning. Actually, my first shipment a few years ago had about 5% germination rate. But like I say, sowing indoors can be tricky. This is a plant that really wants to sow itself.

daninthedirt,

There is not a lot of info out there about wintersowing them, and you may be right about the seeds possibly not surviving freezing temps --- although, often seeds will come through a winter just fine even though the parent plants would certainly not be able to; witness the hundreds of volunteer tomato seedlings that pop up in my garden every spring. So I will be experimenting. I'll put a couple of milk jugs out at the beginning of the winter, and then again in early spring, maybe April-ish or so, and see what comes up. And then we'll know. What's great about wintersowing of course is that whatever the seed needs: stratifying, scarifying, soaking, or whatever, it's going to get it. And the fact that you had such difficulty getting it to germinate, but then all those volunteers came up makes it seem all the more likely that that's the direction to go.

Dave,

I just bought a couple of packs of seed online. The s&h per pack was as much as the packs were themselves, and I ended up paying $10 for 2 packs of seeds. That's a lot! So in general I feel that if the seed is available at my local vendors I'll happily buy it, but if I have to pay twice as much to have it shipped, I'd rather not.

Given how many seeds malabar spinach trivially produces -- zillions of seeds that you just rake up and throw in an envelope, I've always been astonished how much vendors can charge for it.

Madmomgardener, I'll look forward to hearing about your experiment. Now, wintersowing in the ground will offer at least a little thermal protection. Milk jugs surrounded by air offer none. In zone 5, those tropical seeds are going to be seeing -10F temperatures. Doesn't sound comfortable for seeds used to shorts and tees. For malabar spinach, which simply won't germinate at low temps but evidently likes a long soak, just wintersowing in a cool basement might be the right move. My volunteers came up in soil that probably never got below 40F.

I see your point. That's why I plan to put them out both at the beginning of winter and in early spring. I want to see if they CAN make it through a winter, and if they don't, well, April should be kinder and gentler. And if neither one works my fallback is damp paper towel in a closed container on top of the fridge.

Dan,

Thank you for the seeds.

I think the question about cold tolerance of malabar spinach seeds might be answered by people way up north who grow them. Do you get lots of volunteers after a very cold winter? Is the stuff as invasive up north as it is here down south? I don't know the answer to that, but maybe someone does.

I should add that in cold climates, even once the air has warmed up, the stuff won't want to germinate until the soil warms up a lot.

One more thing to add, looking back at the OP. Basellae are not low in oxylates. That being said, my malabar spinach has red stems, so I think it's basella rubra that, this paper says, has one third the oxylates that spinach does. So it has oxylates, Not as much as some other things do, but a lot more than lettuce does.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.606.9199&rep=rep1&type=pdf

About cold tolerance, I did see a post on Dave's Garden from someone in Ohio who said they self seeded in her garden. It occurs to me that another thing I can try, besides putting seeds out in jugs in the classic wintersowing method, is to sprinkle a few on the ground in the spot where I was planning to plant them and and see what happens with that.

As far as the oxalate goes, if you'll notice I said I was looking for a lowER oxalate alternative to spinach. I appreciate the link, though. Good resource for some foods that are not in the conventional Western diet.

That's useful info about self-seeding in cold winters. Thanks. Yes, I myself have to be a little careful about oxalates, and I had never really looked carefully at the oxalate potency of malabar spinach. I am reassured.