#DEFINITION AND SENTENCE OF THE MAILBAR FULL#

#DEFINITION AND SENTENCE OF THE MAILBAR FULL#

Gardeners in colder climates can grow it as an annual.īasella alba prefers a humus-rich, sandy loam in full sun. where it would be perennial are the Deep South or southern Florida. It's intolerant of any chills thus, the only regions in the U.S.

Malabar spinach excels in warm, tropical areas, where it can easily grow a foot per day. It's used as a natural food colorant for agar (vegetable 'gelatine') dishes, sweets, and pastries. The juice from the berries is so intensely purple that it puts beet juice to shame. Upon fertilization, the flowers develop into small, highly ornamental, single-seeded purple berries. Malabar spinach grows eight to ten feet tall and wide and produces inconspicuous white-tinged pink flowers in its leaf axils. Red venation in the leaves adds another level of color contrast. The thick red stems contrast wonderfully with the round, highly textured, two- to four-inch-long dark green leaves. Straight species Malabar spinach has yellowish stems and green leaves and is a pleasing enough plant, but it's the red-stemmed cultivar 'Rubra' that really catches the eye (whether it's growing in a pot or lounging in a salad bowl). It has also been introduced to South America and the Caribbean. Native to India and Indonesia (Malabar is a coastal region in southwestern India), the plant is used in traditional cuisines as far westward from its point of origin as Japan and eastward as Africa. The combination knocked my socks off!īasella alba goes by many other common names besides Malabar spinach, including Ceylon spinach, Indian spinach, vine spinach, and Malabar nightshade. A number of years ago, I visited Wave Hill gardens, in the Bronx, New York, and saw red-stemmed Malabar spinach twining on a trellis and forming the backdrop for a display of dark-leafed cultivars of common economic crops-purple-stemmed sugarcane, black-leafed cotton, aubergine-colored beets, kale, and Swiss chard. Oh, and I forgot to mention this: It's a thing of beauty. The plant is also much better suited for summer growing than its better-known namesake. Easy to grow, versatile in the kitchen, and delicious to eat, this vigorous vine is unrelated to true spinach ( Spinacia oleracea) but produces abundant large meaty leaves that are remarkably spinachlike in taste and form.

One of my favorite hot-weather vegetables is red-stemmed Malabar spinach, Basella alba 'Rubra'.

Definition and sentence of the mailbar