Saving Malabar Spinach Seeds

The other day we posted about the new item we tried in the garden that we really like - Malabar Spinach.  It is a tropical leaf vegetable that grows on a vine.  The leaves are sweet and taste similar to normal spinach.  It was the first year we planted this crop and we want to plant it in the future, so we'd like to save some seeds for next year.

Malabar Spinach leaf

Here are the blooms on the vine.  The blooms become a green berry that is attached to the vine.

Blooms and berries of the Malabar Spinach

The green berries soon ripen to a purple fruit.  When the berry is purple you know that it is ripened and ready to be picked.

Ripe Malabar Spinach berries.

These berries contain the seeds.  The berries have a cross on the underside that makes you believe that there might be four seeds in it, but there's only one.

If you bust the berry in your fingers, it is full of a purplish juice that is very sweet.

Sticky-sweet juice

To pull the seeds off the vine, I learned there's a little trick to it - you must twist it off.  If you pull it off without twisting, you risk breaking the vine which will ruin the other berries that may not be ripened yet.

Twisting off a ripened berry

In no time at all you'll have a handful of Malabar spinach berries and I'll show you how to save the seeds that are in them.

A handful of berries

Each berry contains a seed, but you must remove the fleshy part to expose the seed.  I'm sure you could dry them in the sun, but I was afraid of leaving them outside as I figured the birds would feast on them.  I put them in a sieve, ran water over them and rubbed the berries against the sieve with my fingers removing the fleshy parts of the berry, exposing the seed.

Rubbing the berries.

Notice the seeds below once the purple skin has been rubbed off.

I spread the seeds on a dishrag to allow them to dry overnight.

Drying the seeds

And here are a bunch of Malabar Seeds that I'll be able to plant next year.  Those small seeds will, if the Good Lord's willing, yield many leaves that will be gobbled up by the Sonnier household.

Seeds of Change

We'll store them in a moisture-free, dark location and pull them out in the Spring for planting.