New Zealand spinach, grow Tetragonia in your garden

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Soft, spinach-like leaves on an annual that reaches about a metre, New Zealand spinach (Tetragonia tetragonoides) is grown for greens eaten raw in salads or cooked exactly like spinach. It shrugs off heat and dry spells, but give it full sun, humus-rich soil and water in drought and it out-produces true spinach.

Spin your garden game up with Tetragonia, a brilliant annual plant. It’s easy to grow, doesn’t care for drought, and is more productive than traditional spinach.

Its taste is nearly identical, and since it comes from New Zealand it’s also dubbed “New Zealand spinach.”

Planting Tetragonia

Tetragonia doesn’t ask for much, but it loves well-worked soil. So, during the fall before planting, take time to amend and till the soil. You’ll be happy to know it’s a vegetable that loves growing in full sun, in a warm spot.

Key soil preparation steps:

Here’s how you ready your garden for New Zealand spinach:

• Add humus, like compost or well-rotted manure.
• Got clay-heavy soil? Mix in some sand. And over the winter, if you’ve got a fireplace, sprinkle some of your wood ashes.
• Loosen the soil with a spading fork. If you’re afraid of back problems, go for a broadfork which has better ergonomics.

Seed sowing and planting:

For planting New Zealand spinach, you’ve got two options:

Directly in the ground

Around mid-spring, April-May, soak seeds for 24 hours. Next day, line them up in a row or seed holes. They need their space — plant them apart by at least 32 inches (80 cm).

Start indoors and transplant

Another option is to kick things off early spring, in March. After a 24-hour seed soak, sow them into pots or trays. Use a mix of potting soil and sand. Once they show 2 or 3 leaves, select the more vigorous ones transfer them to the growing bed. Tip: wait for any frosts to end first.

Tetragonia from soil preparation to harvest

The whole season of New Zealand spinach fits into a handful of dates. Use the table to decide when to prepare the bed, which sowing method suits you, and when the picking begins.

Sowing under cover in March simply brings the first pickings forward; both methods end in the same long harvest.

Caring for and growing New Zealand Spinach

Tetragonia thrives in heat and can stand up to dry spells, but it still requires water to truly flourish and reach maximum productivity.

So, keep an eye on watering, especially during long-lasting dry spells.

Pests and diseases:

Tetragonia shows great resilience to diseases. Beware of snails and slugs. They just can’t resist those tender young shoots. It’s like candy to them.

• On bushy herbs with branching stems, such as basil or mint, pinching out the shoot tips encourages side shoots and a leafier plant; avoid this with rosette-forming or single-stemmed species.
• A mulch of straw or grass clippings around the base keeps the soil cool and cuts how often you need to water during hot weather.
• Tetragonia self-seeds readily and seedlings will pop up around the old bed to be kept or hoed off as you please.

Harvesting and storing

Depending on when you sowed your seeds, harvest can start in July, and continue until frost starts nipping at the leaves (around October or November). After picking, these greens can keep in your fridge for a few days.

• Blanch the leaves briefly and discard the water before freezing, since this leaches out some of the soluble oxalates in tetragonia and helps mellow the sharpness of the raw leaves.
• With New Zealand spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides), leave a few shoots unpicked at the end of the run: the hard, horned fruits will drop and often self-sow in the same bed.

Cooking with New Zealand spinach

Whether cooked or raw, these spinach-like leaves fit into a variety of tasty dishes:

• Raw, they’re soft and tasty in salads;
• Cooked, treat them just like you’d treat spinach.

• Blanch the leaves briefly in boiling water and discard that water, since this leaches out much of the soluble oxalate in New Zealand spinach, leaving the cooked greens milder and less astringent.
• Blanched leaves freeze well once squeezed dry, so a heavy picking need not go to waste.