The young shoots and leaves can also be eaten, and are high in protein, though apparently not all communities bother with them as food for humans. The entire plant, including the root, is frequently fed to animals.
I'm going to use this space to document the process of growing anchote from seed to harvest. Hope this is useful to anyone else who chooses to grow it!
The seeds look almost like a thick flat cucumber seed ( which kind of makes sense since it's in the Cucurbitaceae family). I filed down a tiny part of the shell since they are so hard and soaked them for 24 hours in warm water before planting them about .5 inch in a mix of sand, perilite and coco coir. The shell was not very thick so i just lightly sanded it down.
Its been a little over 2 weeks and the seeds are just starting to pop up now. I am going to keep them under grow lights until around the end of May in a space thats pretty cool, no idea where I am going to plant them outside yet though.
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See where your hand is? Not there. It's next to this tiny ad: