Growing Vegetable Amaranth: A Complete Profile
By Growing Home Greens Team · August 10, 2026
Vegetable amaranth is a warm-season leafy green grown for its tender leaves, sometimes streaked in red, pink, or yellow depending on the strain, harvested young rather than left to reach the height of the ornamental amaranths.
Wait for warm soil
This is strictly a direct-seed crop, and it needs soil at 70°F or warmer to germinate reliably. Sowing into cool spring soil just stalls; wait until conditions have warmed rather than pushing an early planting date. For baby leaf production, sow 3 to 5 seeds per inch in rows at least 2 inches apart; for full-size plants, sow 12 to 15 seeds per foot and thin to 6 inches apart. Depth is shallow, an eighth to a quarter inch.
Two ways to harvest
Cut whole plants once they reach about a foot tall, or pinch the terminal growing bud on individual plants to keep them branching and producing new leaves over a longer window instead of a single cut. The pinching approach stretches out the harvest from a single planting.
Rotate it like any other leafy green
As a warm-season crop prone to the usual leaf-spot and root-rot pressures of its family, vegetable amaranth benefits from the same rotation and bed sanitation as other leafy greens rather than being repeated in the same spot season after season.
Vegetable amaranth has no recorded companions or antagonists in our data. See the full companion guide for vegetable amaranth for how it’s tracked. At 4 plants per square foot, it fits well into a Garden Designer greens block planned for mid-to-late summer, once the bed has warmed.
Source: Vegetable Amaranth: Key Growing Information, Johnny’s Selected Seeds.
Companion planting guide for Vegetable Amaranth · Find your planting dates
Typically viable in USDA zones 3-11. Not sure your zone? Look it up by ZIP code.
Method: Direct sow: Direct-sow outside. Vegetable Amaranth doesn't transplant well, or doesn't need the extra time indoors.
See exact start-indoors, direct-sow, and harvest dates for your zone →
How many Vegetable Amaranth plants fit per square foot?
Spacing: 4 per square foot (square-foot-gardening spacing). Mature height: 1-2 ft.
Varieties worth considering
- 'Red Leaf' vegetable amaranth: Johnny's Selected Seeds sells this as their full-size vegetable amaranth offering, known as 'red callaloo' in the Caribbean, comparable to spinach in taste. Their other amaranth listings are microgreen products grown for a different use, not this crop's named-cultivar market. (source)
Cited from the source shown next to each variety. We haven't grown these ourselves yet, so treat this as a research-backed starting point, not a personal endorsement.
Where to buy vegetable amaranth seeds
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See it growing
Search YouTube for "growing vegetable amaranth" videos → (a live search, not a hand-picked video; results vary and aren't vetted by us)
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Growing Vegetable Amaranth: A warm-season leafy green harvested young for its tender, often colorfully streaked leaves, related to the ornamental amaranths but grown to eat.
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