Pinching New Zealand Spinach: How Cutting the Tips Keeps It Producing

Why pinching matters more here than on most crops

On many vegetables pinching is a refinement. On this one it is the main thing you do all season, because harvest and pruning are the same action. Every time you take a shoot tip you remove the growing point, and the plant answers by pushing out two new shoots from the leaf joints below. Do that repeatedly and one plant turns into a dense mound of soft young growth, which is precisely the part you eat.

Left unpinched, the plant does the opposite. It extends a few long stems outward across the ground, with the good tender growth only at the far ends and hard, coarse, sparse leaves along the length behind. It also starts flowering and setting capsules much sooner, because there is no repeated removal of the growing tips to reset it. You end up with a large plant covering a lot of ground and giving you very little worth picking.

The rule is simple and it holds all season: the more often you pinch, the more you get. This is not a plant you can harvest fortnightly and expect to behave. Twice a week is the rhythm that keeps it in soft growth.

The first pinch

Start earlier than feels comfortable. When the seedling has made about six inches (15 cm) of growth and has five or six true leaves, take the top inch (2.5 cm) out with your finger and thumb. Losing that tip on a small plant looks like a setback, but within a fortnight you have three or four shoots instead of one, and every one of them is a future picking point.

Pinch above a leaf joint, not in the middle of a bare length of stem. The new shoots come from the buds in those joints, so a cut just above a pair of leaves gives you immediate regrowth, while a cut halfway along an internode leaves a stub that dies back before anything happens.

Then repeat on each of the new shoots when they in turn reach six to eight inches (15 to 20 cm). Two rounds of this before you start harvesting seriously build the framework that carries the plant through the rest of the summer. It is fifteen minutes of work that roughly doubles what the plant yields.

1. First pinch at six inches (15 cm) Take the top inch (2.5 cm) of the main shoot between finger and thumb, just above a pair of leaves. The stem is soft at this stage and snaps cleanly without needing a knife.
2. Second pinch on each side shoot When the resulting shoots reach six to eight inches (15 to 20 cm), pinch each of them the same way. This is the round that turns a young plant into a properly branched mound.
3. Then pinch as harvest From that point on, every harvest is a pinch. Take the top three to four inches (8 to 10 cm) of a shoot, always cutting just above a leaf joint, and let the two new shoots below it take over.
4. Never take more than a third Leave two thirds of the plant's leaf area behind at any one picking. Strip it harder and growth stops for a fortnight while it rebuilds, which costs you more than the extra handful was worth.

The pinched tips from the first two rounds are perfectly good to eat. Cook them like any other picking rather than throwing them on the compost.

Pinching to stop it seeding

This plant does not bolt in the way spinach or lettuce does, so there is no sudden dramatic run to seed to head off. What happens instead is quieter: small greenish-yellow flowers appear tucked into the leaf joints, and each one that is pollinated becomes one of those hard corky capsules sitting in the axil. The plant puts a steady share of its energy into them, and a plant carrying a lot of capsules produces noticeably less new leaf.

Regular pinching largely solves this by itself, because you are constantly removing the young growth where flowers would form. Where flowers do appear, on stems you have not touched in a while, run a hand along and rub them off along with a few inches of the stem behind them. Do it before the capsules harden and go brown, both to save the plant's energy and to stop them dropping into the bed.

That second reason matters. Fallen capsules survive the winter in the soil and germinate the following summer wherever they landed, which is how this crop earns its reputation for turning up uninvited for years. Taking flowers off as part of your normal picking round costs almost nothing and saves that entirely.

1. Check the leaf joints when you pick Look into the angle between leaf and stem on the older growth. Small greenish flowers or hard green knobs sitting there are the capsules forming. Rub them off with a thumb as you go.
2. Cut back stems that have set heavily A stem carrying a run of hardening capsules is finished as a picking stem. Cut it back to a joint near the crown and let a fresh shoot replace it, rather than leaving it to ripen seed.
3. Take capsules out of the garden Do not drop removed capsules on the bed or into a compost pile you will spread. They are tough enough to survive both and will germinate wherever they end up.
4. Note when flowering began Record the week you first found capsules forming. It is the point in your own summer when picking has to become twice weekly, and knowing it lets you act before the plant has committed to seed.

Rescuing a plant that got away

Anyone who goes on holiday in midsummer comes back to the same thing: a wide sprawling mat of coarse leaves and long bare stems, capsules in every leaf joint, and nothing tender in sight. This plant recovers from that far better than most greens, so it is worth cutting rather than pulling.

Cut the whole plant back to about six inches (15 cm) from the crown, taking out all the old stems and every capsule you can find. It looks brutal. Then water deeply, mulch and give a balanced liquid feed, and it will push new shoots from the crown and from the remaining joints within one to two weeks. Three weeks after the cut you are picking soft tips again.

The one thing that decides whether this works is timing. A hard cut back with six weeks or more of warm weather still to come pays for itself easily. The same cut late in the season, when nights are already dropping toward 45F (7C), will not regrow in time and simply ends the crop early. If the cold is near, take one final harvest of whatever is usable instead.

Write down the date of any hard cut back and the date you were picking again. Knowing your own regrowth interval tells you how late in the season a rescue cut is still worth making.