Throw Away Your Cans, Popeye . . . It’s Almost Spinach

I love spinach, but it must have the shortest season of all vegetables. It’s no wonder that Popeye ate it from a can. Even in my fairly cool, somewhat coastal garden, it grows well only in late winter. Forget about summer.

That’s why I’m trying some hot weather substitutes this year. One is an amaranth, native to the tropics, with various kinds grown for their flowers, seeds or colorful foliage.

In Asia, a number are grown for their edible leaves, to be steamed like spinach, and it’s one of these I’m trying. I first saw the seed in a Shepherd’s catalog (30 Irene St., Torrington, CT 06790, [860] 482-3638), where it is headlined as a “hot weather replacement for spinach.”

They call it “Mirah” amaranth and describe the taste as being “just like nutty-tasting, delicate spinach.” As I phoned in the order, I was thinking pine nuts sprinkled on spinach. Yum.

The seed germinated easily and quickly, and I thinned all but a few, which should be enough because plants grow to a bushy 2 feet high and the recommended spacing is 18 inches apart in rows 48 inches apart.

Unlike spinach, which takes forever to become anything worth weeding around, the amaranth exploded out of the ground with wide, succulent leaves, each dramatically marked with a big splash of deep maroon. Right away they made a striking addition to the mostly green vegetable garden.

Raw, the leaves tasted like chlorophyll, but steamed they were similar to spinach, though I’m having a hard time detecting the “nutty” taste. I think comparing them to another of the garden greens, like beet tops or collards, might be more fair.

Cooking them is like cooking spinach: Wash them, then steam the leaves in the water that clings to them, for just minutes. And I could have grown more, because harvesting quickly diminishes the crop.

The Shepherd’s catalog is on the Web at: https://www.shepherdseeds.com

The Seeds Blum catalog (HC 33 Idaho City Stage, Boise, ID 83706, [800] 742-1423) lists a dozen varieties of edible-leaf amaranth, including the Victorian bedding plant love-lies-bleeding, which I gather you can eat as well as admire. The extensive print catalog of heirloom, open-pollinated seeds costs $3 but is also on the Web at:https://www.seedsblum.com

Malabar spinach (Basella alba) is another substitute I’m trying this summer. This tropical plant produces long vining stems (that make pretty white flower spikes). Steam several inches of the tip growth, stems and all; they make tasty greens, a treat in mid-summer, very similar to spinach.

To my taste, neither of these substitutes is a true replacement, but they are among the better cooked greens I’ve tried, and they seem to thrive in summer’s heat.

Tomato Bugs

Tomatoes got off to a sizzling start this spring, thanks to all the warm weather. Even though I didn’t get around to planting my early varieties until late March, ‘Early Girl’ is went over the top of its 6-foot cage several weeks ago, and we’ve been eating vine-ripened tomatoes for more than a month.

Everybody got early tomatoes this year. From Torrance, another coastal gardener wrote to say he’d picked his first ripe tomatoes on May 19, “the earliest ever,” from a late January planting.

I also planted ‘First Lady,’ a new early variety, and found that the tomatoes ripened only a few days after ‘Early Girl.’ They are bigger and grow on a shorter, less-vigorous vine that has only half-filled its cage while producing tons of tomatoes. Co-workers who sampled some at the office thought they were tasty.

We again got those mysterious, prickly little bugs, carried onto the plants by ants, though a spray of insecticidal soap wiped out both.

According to Rosser Garrison, an entomologist with Los Angeles County, they were keel-backed or solanaceous tree hopper larvae (Antianthe expansa).

The larvae look black and are spiny so you can’t just squish them with your fingers. The adults are quite different, green in color, with very pointed keel-shaped backs. Adults also have sets of spines near the head.

They feed on all kinds of solanaceous plants, including peppers, eggplants, tomatoes and the common ornamental potato vine, Solanum jasminoides, which is where the ants got the larvae. It probably wasn’t such a good idea to plant the tomatoes that close to the solanum.

Another Rose Pest

Is there anything out there that doesn’t munch on roses? No sooner had we knocked down the rose slugs (actually sawfly larva) this spring with paraffinic horticultural oil than something began to skeletonize the leaves again. Now what?

It’s at times like this that I threaten to remove all the roses and stick to the many plants in my garden that grow unbothered, from abutilons to zauschnerias (which are just beginning to flower, to the delight of hummingbirds).

This time it was a skinny little green worm, perhaps the larva of a geometric moth, suggested Garrison, often called a measuring or inch worm. “They’re very common in the L.A. Basin,” he said.

Because they’re caterpillars, liquid B.T. (Bacillus thuringiensis) knocked them out. This stomach bacteria effects only caterpillars, working best on youngish larva.

To identify the larva, I had to look for the characteristic back set of legs. They have no legs between the front and back sets, which is why they crawl in such an odd way, moving their hindquarters first, then advancing with the front, inching their way along.

I was careful to spray only the inch worms, because not far away the boldly striped caterpillars of those beautiful anise swallowtail butterflies were nibbling on my bronze fennel, and I didn’t want them to die in the fusillade.

In the garden, it’s important to identify your targets, make sure they are actually the ones responsible, then find the safest, narrowest way to control them, which may mean simply picking bugs off. Remember that some damage is natural and to be tolerated, and to carefully consider the surroundings.

While I was sitting outside the next morning, our friendly jay landed on the rose and grabbed another larva, this one pretty fat, tearing it into bite-size chunks at my feet to feed to her teenagers, which were behaving badly on a nearby branch, squawking and fluttering their wings for food.

If I had gone to the store and bought a poison insecticide, instead of using the biological B.T., she might have fed her young a poisoned worm. If I had sprayed indiscriminately, even with the B.T., I might have killed this summer’s swallowtails.