Summer - DF

Chenopodium nuttalliae

Huazontle – an underappreciated food! Adrian Chiles, Guardian columnist, calls Huazontle his “favourite new superfood.” 

This is an undemanding, reliable crop, provided you don’t plant the small seeds too deep. It grows fast in average soil. Cooked leaves do indeed taste like spinach. In Mexico, the green, immature seed heads are eaten, and the grain is apparently edible too. It produces beautiful, bright pink-red stalks and seed heads, making it strikingly ornamental as well. It’s heat and drought-tolerant and quite resilient. It has a long history of both wild collection and cultivation in both North America and Mexico, and it’s likely it was domesticated twice, once in Eastern North America and once in Mexico.

Transitional Organic

Growing Instructions:

Grow Huazontle in the summer, starting it after there is no chance of frost. One way to determine a good starting time is to watch weeds: if lambsquarters is sprouting, it should be time to plant this as well. If growing only for greens, you can start early summer for fastest growth. Otherwise, you may need to start late spring. This plant grows well in average soils, provided soil is well-drained and it receives full sun. The seeds are small, making sowing somewhat tricky. I have only direct sown it, but I imagine transplanting, if done at a small size, would also work. Sow on soil surface, lightly press into soil, and cover no more than 1⁄8” deep. Don’t let it dry out. Space plants 6” apart for greens production, and 2-3’’ apart if you want to grow full-sized plants — over 6’. Selectively harvest leaves as it grows or cut off whole branches. For traditional Mexican dishes, harvest green stalks with green seedheads.

Dry growing info: It is quite heat and drought-tolerant. Our patch was grown without irrigation, in the poorer, drier part of the field, and the plants showed little evidence of water stress. If attempting to dry grow Huazontle, space plants widely, mulch, keep well weeded, and employ windbreaks.