Amaranth: Good and bad news.

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Amaranth: Good and bad news.

Written by Frank Gilliland - Usenet

Thursday, 14 August 2008 22:11

It takes very little effort to grow Amaranth. Just turn over the dirt and
they will grow from seeds that have already been buried for years, maybe
even decades. But after cultivating some volunteers in my garden this year
(v. retroflexus) I have come to the conclusion that, as a food crop, it's
crap.

Each plant takes about 1 square foot of land and they don't like to be
crowded. They can grow to 5' tall or more and have large seed heads with
thousands of seeds. But even though the seeds are very high in protein,
they are extremely small, each plant yielding only half an ounce of seeds
or less. This translates to a theoretical -maximum- of 700 hundred pounds
per acre -- a fraction of what is possible from other crops both in weight
-and- nutrition.

Also, all those super-tiny seeds must be ground up before they can be
digested; otherwise they will pass right through your system. They are
tough and difficult to grind even in a lab-type mortar & pestle.

The greens are said to be edible but high in nitates -- absolutely true.
After doing several tests on Amaranth and several other plants for
comparison, it was clear that the nitrate content is -very- high; in one
test it was about 8 times higher than Spinach. That's high enough that I
wouldn't recommend eating them. (BTW, the test I used was the old ferrous
sulfate 'brown-ring' test; sample extracts were systematically diluted
until they no longer produced a ring, and the number of dilutions counted
and compared. Certainly not precision but good enough for government
work.)

Amaranth does have two redeeming qualities: First, because of the high
nitrogen content, and because the roots grow so deep that they pull up
nutrients and minerals from the subsoil (very high ash content), the plant
should make great fodder for the compost pile. Second, it pops up just
about anywhere the ground has been turned, no cultivation or seeding
required. In fact, I've been weeding them from my garden for over 10 years
and I'm -still- getting new plants every year.

So my conclusion is that if some are left to grow where they appear,
pulled up just before the seeds ripen (a few seeds will escape anyway but
that's ok), then composted over winter, Amaranth may have a place in the
garden as an 'organic' fertilizer. And that will be a project for next
year.