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Planting
Days to maturity
Seasonal yields
Sow indoors · Direct sow · Transplant outdoors
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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.
Record at a glance
Growing profile
- Sun
- Full Sun
- USDA zone
- USDA 9–11
- Soil
- Loam
- Moisture
- Well-Drained · Moist
Vertical layer
Shrub- Soil pH
- 5.5–6.5
- Plant type
- Perennial
- Mature height
- 3–5 ft
- Mature spread
- 12–30 in
- Plant spacing
- 3–6 ft
- Root type
- Not yet recorded
- Spread pattern
- None
Keep exploring
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The deeper layer
Plan what comes next.
- Primary
- Locked ecological function
- Secondary
- Locked ecological function
- Byproduct
- Locked ecological function
Behind the record
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