The House of Popeye

Young alugbati bushes. This plant is so prolific even our neighbors are finding them growing in their planter boxes.

           Since our dogs eat only dry nuggets, you might as well compare them to a child growing up on any of today's snack foods touted to be "vitamin enriched."

            My maid Lourdes loves to grow vegetables. When I decided to strip off a 10-year-old vine with hanging roots off our trellis for a change, I gave her permission to plant a prolific vegetable vine temporarily. This fast-growing vegetable, I noticed, has been lording it over our front garden for quite awhile.

            But I didn’t know how fast it would grow.

The Malabar Vine or alugbati covers our trellis.

            Before I knew it, this spinach vine has been providing a shade over our trellis, with black berries hanging over the grills like clusters of attractive grapes.

            If only they were red so the birds could pick on it. But they’re black and dry to the taste so they’re useless.

            This edible vegetable is a kind of spinach vine called Malabar Spinach, Ceylon Spinach, or the “red vine” because of its red purplish stems. Locally it’s called the “alugbati,” a kind of spinach with an earthy taste and slimy texture. A lot of people don’t like it because of its slippery texture. I don’t like it because it has a taste like soil (or sometimes called "earthy").

            In other Asian countries, the spinach is eaten boiled (boil until cooked and discard water), used as a salad ingredient, or in dishes with noodles or other vegetables. Lourdes once invented a “vegetable burger” made of very young spinach leaves, carrots, turnips, and dipped in beaten egg. The alugbati is an excellent source of calcium, iron, Vitamin A, Vitamin C. and Vitamin B. It contains saponins that act as phytochemicals, fighting cancer and other diseases.         

The plant is also popular for its medicinal properties. Here are what alugbati can do:

1.      the roots can be used as a poultice to reduce local swellings;

2.      the sap can be applied to acne areas to eliminate irritation;

3.      the sap has a softening or soothing effect, especially to the skin;

4.      it is a diuretic;

5.      it is a mild laxative;

6.      pulped leaves are applied to boils, ulcers and abscesses;

7.      Leaf juice with sugar is effective for inflammation of the nose and throat with increased production of mucus. Also used to treat gonorrhea and balanitis

8.      Leaf juice with butter has a soothing effect on burns and scalds.

9.      Stem and leaf extract can cure habitual headache.

10.  Fruits maybe used as cheeks and lips make-up and dye.

11.  Good source of fibers.

But when you have a ton of that growing in your garden, what would you do? We feed it to the dogs.

Whenever I go out to buy a sack of dog food it would always bother me that our beloved pets are growing up on processed food. When I read about how dog food  kibbles are made, it makes an informed dog owner look twice at his pet’s food bowl and ask: Is there anything fresh in that bowl? Where are the valuable enzymes?

Enzymes come from fresh food. In humans, enzymes are what help dissolve those metabolic wastes which pile up in our blood – cholesterol accumulations, uric acid formations, toxic wastes, and others. But because the modern man’s diet is now seldom fresh, the cancers and various other illnesses of today are found in younger and younger patients. Once a food passes through heat the enzymes die so you can imagine how sensitive these are. Modern man may eat well but he eats “dead food,” or food with no life.

Packy eats his morning meal with alugbati mixed with his kibbles. Seedlings sprout between stones around him.

 Since our dog eats only dry nuggets all his life, you might as well compare him to a child growing up on any of today’s snack foods touted to be “vitamin enriched.” In other words, our dogs are growing up on purely manufactured food.

            We have a lot of this spinach so we might as well add it mashed into the dog food kibbles to at least provide the dogs’ systems with something fresh, from where the much-needed enzymes will come from. Thus, every morning, Lourdes runs a harvest of this yucky spinach in the blender and adds it to their meal, mixed with a lot of water. Sometimes she also throws into the blender the skin of bananas and papayas (taken from my morning fruit shakes). The afternoon meal is pure dog food. 

            There hasn’t been any complaint so I guess the dogs can take it. But just as fast as Lourdes cuts their stems, the vine grows back quickly. Now, their black berry-like fruits have scattered all over the ground and there are seedlings everywhere. This is too much. Lourdes now is put to task to uproot those seedlings and add them to the blender every morning, aside from the regular harvest of leaves. 

Alubgbati seedlings sprout behind the pots and the wall.

No, this is not grass growing between the stones. It's the alugbati seedlings.

Seedlings share space with potted plants. On the ground below seedlings grow like an invasion army.

Spot eats his daily kibbles with spinach. Dalmatians have a high uric acid level in their system so we feed Spot his food soaked in water. A well hydrated dog is not prone (hopefully) to kidney stone formation.

A young alugbati seedling struggles to emerge between the stones along the garden pathway.