Blitum virgatum
Real strawberry spinach ( Blitum virgatum ), fruiting
The real strawberry spinach ( Blitum virgatum, Syn Chenopodium foliosum ), also called by exfoliated strawberry spinach, is a plant and old type of vegetable from the genus Blitum in the family of Amaranthaceae ( Amaranthaceae ).
Features
The real strawberry spinach growing as an annual plant, and reaches a height of 15 to 70 centimeters. The stem is usually branched from the base to. The thin branches are bright green and bare. The both sides bright green leaves are narrowly triangular - ovate, about as long or longer than the petiole, about 2-5 cm long and 2-3 cm wide, with wedge-shaped or truncated base. The leaf margin is serrated irregular deep at the base, with slightly recurved teeth ( when aged men strawberry spinach leaf margin is serrated, however weak or entire margins ). The upper leaves are shorter, lanceolate or ovate - pike -shaped, with one to four pairs of lateral teeth or entire.
The real strawberry spinach flowers from June to July. In contrast to the aged men strawberry spinach also the upper flower clusters have bracts. The hermaphrodite or female flowers are on short axillary branches and form spherical or oblong- spherical ball. The light green perianth consists of usually three Tepalenzipfeln. There are one to three stamens and an ovary with two scars present.
For fruit time, in August-September, the perianth is red and fleshy, so that the flower clusters from afar remember strawberries. The fruit inside of the flower is flattened spherical, with membranous pericarp, which bears the seeds. The vertical seed has about 1 mm in diameter, its seed coat is reddish brown or black and smooth, blunt or slightly concave at the edge. The embryo is a half-ring.
The chromosome number is 2n = 18
Ecology
The Real Strawberry Spinach is a food plant for the caterpillars of the large head moth Pholisora catullus.
Occurrence
The real strawberry spinach occurs in the mountains of northwest Africa and western Eurasia. In Germany it is bound to heat- favored, subatlantisch tinted regions and in many places lost.
He settled there preferably warehouses corridors in heat- favored locations. Even in ancient literature, he is always referred to as rare. In the Central Alps, it grows in nitrophilous, semi-natural corridors warehouses, to the coastal dunes of the Frisian Islands in association with natural elderberry bushes. Otherwise, you can find him on fallow fields and in ruderal, to ruins, caves, dumps and roads on moderately dry to fresh, fertile, humus-rich soils.
System
The first description was in 1753 by Linnaeus under the name Blitum virgatum in Species Plantarum 1, pp. 4-5. Paul Friedrich August Ascherson put this kind in 1864 as Chenopodium foliosum in the genus Chenopodium ( in: Flora of the province of Brandenburg 1 ( 2), S.572 ). According to recent molecular genetic studies of real strawberry spinach is closer to the genus Spinacia used as the goose feet ( Chenopodium ) in the strict sense. Therefore parted Fuentes - Bazan et al. ( 2012) from him from the genus Chenopodium, and set him in the genus Blitum. This is grouped together with Spinacia in the tribe Anserineae.
History
Information for use as spinach mostly missing, so that it can be assumed that there was no widespread cultivation of the plant already in the 19th century. While it is likely that today's very volatile deposits are relics of an earlier cultivation, it but then go forward to the time before or during the Thirty Years War back.