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Arabian Round Leaf Grape Cissus Rotundifolia Seeds
Packet of 10+ freshly harvested home grown seeds!
This super hardy bright red grape is known by a heap of names including Arabian round leaf vine, Arabian wax cissus, Arabian wax leaf, Arabian wax leaf vine, bushveld grape, Cissus rotundifolia var ferrugineopubescens, Cissus rotundifolius, Cissus ferrugineopubescens, grape cissus, grape leaf cissus, Peruvian grape ivy, Grape ivy, Round leaf ivy, Peruvian wax cissus, roundleaf grape ivy, Saelanthus rotundifolius, succulent grape, Venezuelan treebine, Vitis crassifolia, Vitis forskahlii, Vitis rotundifolia, Peruvian grape ivy, umjovane, lheveialhovo, pangalatane, wax leaf, Cissus crassifolia, Vitis crassifolia, and Cissus rotundifolia is the currently accepted one.
If you would prefer I also sell the Rooted Plant Cuttings here.
As the names suggest its a beautiful type of very hardy grape, and a very nutritious one at that.
With most grapes its the fruit that makes it cool and while this one is very edible it has a large seed and a very thick rubbery skin that should be discarded after popping the fruit out into your mouth. The taste is fine, mildly sweet and quite nice but subtle, and it lacks the juicy sweetness of the much more common supermarket alternatives.
Like a lot of wild grapes it also sometimes has a mild peppery prickly flavour that lingers at the end. Way less than most, not all the time, and not offensive, but not particularly more-ish either.
Dried candied or used in hooch it doesn’t have the same effect in my experience.
All that said this fella is best used as a hardy leaf crop not as a table fruit.
It is super drought tolerant and I never bother to water mine, at all. If you do the growth is awesome and once established a small clump can pump out big arm loads of leaf matter every couple months.
The chooks and ducks smash it and its a really economical way to supplement their food and lower your costs once they work out its a food.
The leaf and tuberous roots are traditionally slow cooked into soups stews and curries but I like to dry the leaves threaded on strings and hang in the cupboard as a back up vegetable for when I can’t be bothered going outside or it’s raining. By drying and then later cooking it helps to break down a lot of the oxalic acid just like I do with Taro root leaves.
When dried it has about ~13% protein, ~8% fat the majority of it unsaturated, 8% fibre and the rest is made up of carbohydrates vitamins minerals and trace elements.
Despite the wide range of location based common names it is originally from Eastern Africa and this is no doubt why it is such a hardy and productive species. I reckon it is another one that prepper and self sufficiency folks should strongly consider growing. China now has some massive plantings of it and it’s now being used as a filler and thickener in a whole range of processed foods both there and all around the world.
The natural beauty of this climbing plant means most folks wouldn’t ever consider it could also be a staple food crop, which to my eye is another big advantage.
It is super easy to grow from FRESH seeds like what I sell and it only takes a month or two just planted shallowly in a sandy well draining soil mix. It is important to note that in my experience old seeds will not germinate at all no matter what I tried so keep that in mind if you decide to buy this species from other folks.
I have never had any germinate when I bought from a dozen of so different commercial sellers all around the world back in the day, and I now believe it was most likely just basic dodgy old seeds that were the cause. Seed viability is awesome year one, seems to really taper off at two years and then drop very rapidly to zero by the 3year mark. It could just be a heavy dormancy that kicks in with age?
But I mean, if you just buy fresh seeds from me you avoid the issue entirely.
Nothing that I sell is every more than a year old and vast majority of our species end up being sold within a couple months.
It also grows super easy from cuttings and for them all you do it break off length with a few nodes or jointed sections, then stick half of it under the ground. Roots and new shoots forming within a couple months in warm climates.
With the vine growing 10-30meters you will never have a shortage of cuttings once you get it established!
I’m told it handles mild frost ok but full sun in a warm climate is where it performs the best by far.
Home grown by me and the Mrs, no chems, no nasties, no problems!!!
