Plant · P-317

Cranberry Hibiscus

Sabdariffa acetosella

Cranberry hibiscus is a warm-season leaf crop grown as much for its wine-red, maple-shaped foliage as for the tart, mucilaginous leaves themselves, which taste like sour spinach raw or cooked and also steep into tea and juice. Because it's harvested for leaves rather than for seed or calyx, a hard freeze that kills it in one night has already cost nothing - everything worth eating was ready from the day it had leaves. It doubles as an ornamental hedge and, planted ahead of a tomato bed, breaks the root-knot nematode cycle for whatever follows it.