Molokhia (Egyptian Spinach)

Wait until the soil has warmed to 65F before sowing outdoors, then sow very shallow - the seed should be barely covered with soil. Space rows 30 to 36 inches apart. Do not rush this by the calendar; check the soil with a thermometer, because 65F arrives in April in the South and not until June in the far North. Molokhia is a warm-season annual from the tropics, and its seed sits and rots rather than germinating in cold ground. The seed is tiny, so burying it deep means it exhausts itself before reaching light.

Molokhia can be direct seeded or transplanted. If your summer is short, start seed indoors in trays and set plants out only after the soil has reached 65F. Transplanting is the more reliable route wherever the outdoor stand is unpredictable or the warm window is narrow. Extension notes that molokhia's small seeds make consistent germination difficult outdoors, so sowing in a controlled tray gets a reliable stand and buys back weeks a short-season grower cannot spare.

Molokhia has an average nitrogen appetite: 50 to 90 pounds of nitrogen per acre, which works out to roughly 0.1 to 0.2 pounds of actual nitrogen per 100 square feet of garden. Use the lower end on soil already rich in organic matter. Target a soil pH of 6.0 to 7.0, and soil test rather than guess for phosphorus and potassium. Every part you eat is a leaf, and leaves are built on nitrogen. Phosphorus and potassium are worth testing for instead of adding blind, since excess simply runs off into water.

Once the seedlings have their first true leaves, thin them. For bunched greens cut all at once, thin to 2 to 3 inches apart in the row. For plants you will pick from all summer, thin to 6 to 12 inches apart. The two spacings serve two different crops. Tight spacing gives slender single-cut stems, while wide spacing gives each plant the room to branch into the bush that carries repeated pickings.

Water thoroughly at seeding or transplanting and keep the ground damp until the plants take hold. Once established, molokhia tolerates drought, so water deeply and only when the plants genuinely need it rather than on a fixed schedule. The crop is drought tolerant once its roots are down, but a seedling has no root system to draw on and a dry spell at that stage kills the stand outright.

Check the plants weekly through the warm months. Extension lists molokhia as vulnerable to aphids and to leaf-eating beetles including Japanese beetles, and plants grown under glass or plastic are vulnerable to spider mites. Turn leaves over to inspect the undersides, where aphids and mites feed. If you find pests, standard physical measures for any leafy green apply: hand-pick beetles and rinse aphid colonies off with a firm spray of water. Aphids and mites both feed on the undersides of leaves where you will not see them from above, and beetles chew the very tissue you intend to eat, so damage on this crop is damage to the harvest itself.

For a bunched cut, the crop is ready in 40 to 60 days. For continuous picking, start taking individual leaves and tender shoot tips at about 40 days and keep going all summer as the plants turn bush-like. Treat it as cut-and-come-again: new growth pushes from below each cut. Every cut releases the buds beneath it to break, so the plant answers repeated picking by branching instead of running up to a single stem. Taking the young tips also keeps you eating the tender growth rather than the tough older leaves.

When the planting is done for the year, pull the crop and remove the debris from the bed rather than leaving old stems standing. If anthracnose showed up during the season - depressed yellow-brown, water-soaked stem lesions that turn black and necrotic - take that residue out of the field entirely rather than burying it in place. (Deep plowing of residue is the recommendation for sclerotium rot, a different disease, not for anthracnose.) The anthracnose fungus Glomerella cingulata carries over on last year's stems and debris, so ground left littered hands next season's planting its own infection. Removing the residue from the field is what lowers inoculum; burying it in the same bed leaves it there.