It is incredible how only after about 80 days, close to three months, these amaranthus plants of mine went from small seeds, to seedlings, to full-grown plants, and today, being harvested. In such a short amount of time, I grew a handful of seeds into days' worth of food and many many seeds. Now, I have enough seeds to grow four, five, six times more than I started with, and I still haven't harvested everything yet!
When I went into the garden this morning, I saw most of the amaranthus seed heads were dropping their seeds. This is my usual sign to harvest the seed heads. I was busy the whole day, but just before sunset, I quickly harvested most of the seed heads that lost most of their seeds. Some of them are still not ready, usually only harvested 90 days or so after planting them. But a lot of them were ready to be harvested!
I took a pair of scissors and went into the garden and took off most of the seed heads. It is still strange to me how small these seed heads are compared to the ones I usually grow at home. Compared to the salad rocket that I grew next to it, it is funny that the amaranth leaves did not grow as well.
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What I am hoping for is that some of them will regrow either smaller seed heads, which I will then use to self-sow for the next season, or that I can still harvest some new leaves for salads and so on. Sometimes they do indeed regrow when you cut them, which is already evident (see below)!
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When I harvested the seed heads, I saw one of the plants lying to the side. It was stuck in the little fence alongside which I grew them. But all along the stem new growth started (the third image on the right, above). It is interesting to see that this happened, and I wonder what the practicality of this would be if you grew plants like this. I know weed growers do this to increase their yield. When the plant grows, you purposefully lay it on its side to grow more seed heads. Maybe you can increase your yield like this, but you will obviously need more space. I am already thinking about basil or something like that, you can grow so much more from one plant!
In the past, it was just me doing the harvesting and growing. Usually, I leave the three or four leaves on the seed heads as it would have taken too much time to take them all off. But this time around, I got my girlfriend to help me pick the leaves from the seed head, making harvesting the seeds so much easier!
In the end, I had so many leaves that I added some to my salad! I also have some stored in the fridge, I want to see how they will do in there. I mostly compost what I do not eat, as I prefer to pick fresh from the plants. But I thought why not save them and see how they do in the fridge.
But for now, I hope you enjoyed the amaranth harvesting journey with me. Hopefully, I get some good yields this time around.
Happy gardening, and keep well.
All of the writings in this post are my own. The photographs are also my own, taken with my Nikon D300.