Huazontle - Summer Spinach

Alternative Summer Spinach 'Huazontle' DF

Chenopodium nuttalliae

Seeds per packet: ~100

Huazontle is a vastly underappreciated food. It is an undemanding, reliable crop, provided you don’t plant the small seeds too deep. It grows fast in average soil, providing leaves once cooked, 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 is fun and interesting to grow. From a taxonomy perspective, it seems undecided if this plant is its own species or a subspecies of Chenopodium berlandieri. The science is clear, however, that 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:

“In eastern North America, archaeological evidence indicates that Ch. berlandieri was harvested as a wild plant as early as 8,500 B.P. [before present time] and was an important domesticated crop plant in the region for >3,500 years (from ca. 1850 B.C. to A.D. 1750)”

Growing info: 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.

Adrian Chiles, Guardian columnist, calls Huazontle his “favourite new superfood.” This relative of quinoa is pretty obscure, so when I discovered someone, anyone, talking about it, I was surprised — and delighted. (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/02/heard-of-aztec-broccoli-let-me-tell-you-about-my-favourite-new-superfood)

“The archaeological record of Mexico also offers clear evidence of human harvesting of wild stands of Ch. berlandieri, along with a variety of other plants producing similarly sized small seeds, for thousands of years before the arrival of the Spanish.” (https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0604335103)

Our large thanks to Siskiyou Seeds for providing our stock seed.