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Butterfly Pea Mix Clitoria Ternatea Seeds
Mixture of 10+seed per packet, from this awesome edible and ornamental vine!
It contains seeds from single straight edged blooms, frilled edged singles, double frilled ones, double straight edged ones, in every shade from white to deep dark blue, even a couple pink shaded ones.
As I grow them altogether in a large tub, the flowers have all crossed up together and I mixed the seeds from all of them up evenly before packing the seeds, the colour combinations in your packet could be literally anything.
Might even be something truly unique, and if you reckon your have something fantastic on your hands it may pay to keep a few seeds from the more interesting types separate, and start your own breeding program.
I love them in all their shapes and shades, and if you look really closely, you can see how it got its unique latin botanical name…..
Not just highly ornamental, but totally edible too!
Grows quickly, but it’s still a very manageable and dainty looking vine.
Treat it as an annual down south, and plant it in spring, but from the QLD border up, you should be fine treating it as a perennial.
The flowers can be made into an interesting bright blue tea, or for colouring sticky sweet rice.
They can be dipped in tempura batter and fried (really quite good surprisingly!)
The young pods can be eaten cooked up like any other bean.
It’s a legume and a perfect choice for planting at the base of a small shrub or fruit tree.
That way it adds nitrogen to the soil feeding your tree.
That provides you with a lot more fruit, and you get a feed of beans and flowers, when there are no fruit to be picked!
Brilliant hey!
The leaf itself, although a bit fibrous, contains huge amounts of protein.
So much in fact, its valued as a fodder crop in its own right, similar in nutrition to Alfalpha or Lucerne seeds!
Cattle, sheep, goats and many other herbivores prefer it over other legumes and grasses.
Traditionally used to enhance memory, sexual dysfunction and the fully ripe dried black seeds were even traditionally used as a laxative/purgative in high doses!
Even more interesting, the internet tells me that in animal testing extracts of Clitoria ternatea roots demonstrated nootropic, anxiolytic, antidepressant, anticonvulsant and antistress activity. The active constituents included tannins, resins, starch, taraxerol and taraxerone.
Recently, several biologically active peptides called cliotides have been isolated from the heat-stable fraction of Clitoria ternatea extract. Cliotides belong to the cyclotides family and activities studies show that cliotides display potent antimicrobial activity against E. coli, K. pneumonia, P. aeruginosa and cytotoxicity against Hela cells. These peptides have potential to be lead compound for the development of novel antimicrobial and anti-cancer agent.
Well that’s it folks. It’s pretty awesome hey!
Grown by us organically, no nasties, no chems, no problems!!!
