Amaranth

Amaranth is our most flamboyant crop, hands down. Enormous and brightly coloured, it is both a remarkable ornamental and a wonderful food. It is also exceptional in its degree of increase: each plant produces tens of thousands of seeds.
Growing amaranth for grain is very easy. Harvesting, however, is a bit of a trick. The problem has to do with our climate: unlike the parts of Central America where amaranth was historically grown, we have wet, cold weather in the fall when our amaranth is reaching maturity. So we have had to experiment with non-traditional methods to harvest it. These take some explaining; if you are interested, please read our article on harvesting amaranth.
A note on seed saving: there are three species of grain amaranth, Amaranthus caudatus, A. cruentus and A. hypochondriacus. There are also several species of amaranth grown primarily for their greens, particularly Amaranthus tricolor and A. dubius. There are also many other species which are weeds. It is hard to tell the grain amaranths apart. However, they are distinctly different from the greens amaranths and the weedy amaranths in having light tan/yellow seed, while the others have black seed. Apparently black is a dominant trait. There seems to be a lot of debate about how much amaranths cross-pollinate, with some people reporting high rates of crossing and some low. My recommendation is, if you really want to keep multiple grain amaranths from crossing with each other, put them 500 m or more apart. But I have not yet seen crosses with redroot pigweed (our most common weedy amaranth), and they don’t cross with Amaranthus tricolor.