Suaeda glauca Seeds | Glaucous Sea Blite
LATIN NAME: Suaeda glauca
COMMON NAME: Glaucous Sea Blite
Plant Profile
Glaucous sea blite is an annual of the amaranth family, native to the salt marshes and coastal flats of northern China, Korea and Japan. It grows thirty to a hundred centimetres, with upright, often reddish stems and fleshy, blue-green leaves that are round in section and covered with a waxy bloom.
In late summer the plant turns yellow, then a dull red, and a salt marsh in autumn is coloured by it. The flowers are tiny, green and clustered in the leaf axils, and the seed is small, black and glossy. The whole plant is edible when young, salty and crisp, and it is gathered in spring before it hardens.
Science & Biotechnology
Sea blites are euhalophytes, plants that complete their life cycle in saline soil and accumulate salt in their tissues. Suaeda glauca stores sodium in the vacuole, keeping it away from the cytoplasm, and uses the resulting osmotic gradient to draw water from a soil that would otherwise be too salty to allow it. The mechanism depends on transporters that pump sodium into the vacuole, and those genes have been transferred experimentally into other crops.
The species is also being tested for phytoremediation. It grows on saline-alkali land and on soils contaminated with cadmium, and it takes up salt and metal into harvestable tissue, so that a crop can be removed and the soil improved. Its seed contains twenty to thirty per cent oil, rich in linolenic acid, and the plant has been proposed as an oilseed for land that will grow nothing else.
Uses & Benefits
The young shoots are eaten as a vegetable, blanched to remove some of the salt and dressed with sesame oil and garlic, and they are sold in markets in northern China in spring. The seed is ground and mixed with flour in hard years, and the plant is cut for fodder for camels and sheep.
Its larger use is in land management. It is sown on saline-alkali soil to cover the ground in the first years of reclamation, and it is harvested for biofuel and for the salt that accumulates in its ash. It is also one of the plants used to stabilise the edges of salt lakes and to revegetate the land left behind when a lake dries.
Growing from Seed
Sow in spring, on the surface of a sandy compost, and water with dilute salt water once the seedlings are up, since the plant grows best with some sodium in the root zone. Germination itself takes place in fresh water; the salt is needed afterwards, not before.
The seedlings appear in seven to fourteen days at 20-25 °C. Pot them on before they become crowded, and plant them out in full sun in a bed that drains sharply. The plant tolerates drought and salt and needs no feeding. It will self-sow in a gravel garden, and in a cold climate it behaves as a half-hardy annual, so collect seed in autumn if it is to be kept.
Our Take
A salt-marsh annual that doubles as a spring vegetable and a reclamation tool. Give it salt, sun and sharp drainage, and it will colour the autumn.
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