Beyond Basil: 6 Tropical Edibles You've Probably Never Tried

By Tatiana Anderson, Plant Expert, Top Tropicals

Sunshine: I made La Lot wraps!
Smokey: That is a donut in a leaf.
Sunshine: Exactly. Tropical fusion.
Smokey: Please stay out of the kitchen.

Most herb gardens have the same few plants: basil, parsley, mint, and maybe a pot of lettuce. Keep your basil. Just give it some more interesting neighbors.

You can buy basil at Home Depot. Fresh la lot, katuk, betel leaf, or black pepper leaves are another story. You won't usually find them at an ordinary garden center, and Asian groceries carry them only now and then, often wilted. The easiest way to get them is to grow them.

Which One First?

You don't need all six. Pick the one that fits your yard.

• For a spinach substitute, grow katuk.
• Got a shady spot under a tree? La lot will fill it.
• For a single pot on the porch, grow longevity spinach.
• For bold flavor and a trellis to cover, grow betel leaf.
• For peppercorns you picked yourself, try black pepper.
• For exotic tea with health benefits, plant insulin ginger.

🍃 1. Katuk (Sauropus androgynus)

Also called Tropical Asparagus or Sayur Manis

If someone in your house refuses to eat "weird vegetables," start with katuk. The young shoots are mildly sweet, like fresh peas, and the cooked leaves taste closer to asparagus.

At our B-Farm in Sebring, Florida, we've been growing katuk for several years, and our established plants are ready to harvest almost constantly. We cut the tender young shoots for the kitchen, and they grow right back. In warm weather, new shoots can be ready to trim again within days. And here's the nice part: the more you harvest the tops, the fuller and bushier the plant gets.

Katuk is an upright shrub with small oval leaves set in neat rows along thin stems. Pick the tips and young leaves. It is a common backyard vegetable in Malaysia and Indonesia. The Malay name, sayur manis, means "sweet vegetable."

One common Malaysian dish stir-fries katuk with garlic and egg. In Vietnam it is called rau ngot and goes into a simple soup with minced pork or shrimp. Indonesian cooks add it to sayur bening, a clear vegetable broth.

Eat it cooked, in ordinary portions, as people do in Southeast Asia. Don't juice it. In Taiwan in the 1990s, drinking large amounts of raw katuk juice for weight loss was linked to serious lung damage.

Size: About 5-6 ft left alone, or easily kept around 3-4 ft with regular harvesting.

Cold: Hardy to light frost. A hard freeze may damage or kill the foliage, but established plants can come back quickly from the roots.

First harvest: Our established plants are ready to harvest right away. After cutting, new tender shoots grow quickly, often within just a few days during warm weather.

How many: For most households, 1-3 plants can provide a steady supply of fresh "tropical asparagus" for the kitchen. And unlike annual vegetables, katuk is a perennial, so you keep harvesting from the same plants year after year.

📚 19 delicious authentic Katuk dishes: quick-n-fun exotic recipes
Forget Spinach: The Underrated Multivitamin Plant You Can Grow in Your Backyard - Katuk

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🍃 2. La Lot (Piper sarmentosum)

Also called Lalot, Vietnamese Pepper or Wild Betel

Crush a la lot leaf and you can smell that it is related to black pepper. The scent is warm and peppery, but the leaf itself is barely hot.

The plant grows low and spreads, with glossy heart-shaped leaves. The leaves are the harvest, and in Vietnam they are best known for bo la lot.

To make bo la lot, cooks season ground beef with lemongrass, garlic, shallot, and fish sauce, roll it inside the leaves into finger-sized logs, and grill them. The leaves char at the edges and turn smoky. The rolls are served with rice noodles, fresh herbs, crushed peanuts, and a dipping sauce. A small bed of la lot keeps the grill supplied all summer.

Mark, our facility manager, is not a gardener and usually leaves the plant talk to the rest of us. But La Lot won him over from the kitchen side. "I'm not the plant guy here, but I know what tastes good. We wrapped beef in La Lot leaves from the nursery, grilled it, and I went back for seconds. That's good enough for me."

In Thailand the plant is called cha plu, and its leaves wrap miang kham, a one-bite snack of toasted coconut, peanuts, lime, ginger, and shallot. Thai menus sometimes translate cha plu as "betel leaf," but the two are different plants.

La lot does best in part shade or bright filtered light. It grows well in a pot, even indoors near a well-lit window.

Size: About 1-2 ft tall, spreading along the ground for several feet.

Cold: Hardy to light frost. A hard freeze may damage the foliage, but established plants can quickly regrow from the roots.

First harvest: Established plants are ready to harvest right away. During warm weather, new leaves and shoots regrow within a couple of weeks after picking.

How many: Even one plant can supply plenty of leaves for regular cooking. Plant 2-3 if you also want a fast-growing edible ground cover.

📚 Lalot - Vietnamese Pepper

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🍃 3. Betel Leaf (Piper betle)

Betel leaf and betel nut come from two unrelated plants. Betel nut is the seed of the areca palm (Areca catechu), and chewing it carries known health risks. Piper betle is a climbing vine grown for its leaves.

The large, glossy, heart-shaped leaves look like oversized la lot. They are spicier, with a flavor some people compare to clove, so use only a few at a time.

Across South and Southeast Asia, people offer betel leaves to guests as a sign of hospitality and use them in religious ceremonies and weddings. Cooking with the leaves is more regional. They serve as wraps for small savory bites, and in parts of South India they are dipped in batter and fried.

Train betel up a trellis or post, either in the ground or in a large patio pot.

Size: A vigorous climbing vine that can grow many feet when given support and especially likes climbing trees. It can also be allowed to trail along the ground, where it makes a fast-growing, attractive ground cover. In a pot, keep it smaller with regular trimming.

Cold:Hardy to light frost. A hard freeze may damage the foliage, but established plants can quickly regrow from the roots.

First harvest: Established plants are ready to harvest right away. During warm weather, new leaves and shoots regrow within a couple of weeks after picking.

How many: Even one plant can supply plenty of leaves for regular cooking. Plant 2-3 if you also want a fast-growing edible ground cover or vine.

📚 9 tropical vegetables to grow indoors, or how to have garden-fresh produce all year

📚 How to grow your own Pepper plants. Five most valuable Pipers.

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🍃 4. Longevity Spinach (Gynura procumbens)

Longevity spinach won't win a taste test against real spinach. The leaves are mild and slightly juicy, and they pick up the flavor of whatever they are cooked with. It is worth planting because it grows fast, fills gaps in a bed, and comes back quickly after cutting.

You harvest the young leaves and shoot tips. Eat them raw in salads and sandwiches, or cooked in stir-fries, soups, and eggs.

Gynura procumbens is used in traditional medicine in Southeast Asia, and it is sometimes sold as "Cholesterol Spinach." It has been studied in the lab, but there is no established evidence that eating it treats or prevents any disease.

It does well in pots, hanging baskets, and raised beds.

Size: About 2-3 ft tall and spreading 5-6 ft wide in the ground. In a pot, it can easily be kept compact at around 3 × 3 ft.

Cold: Hardy to light frost. A hard freeze may damage the foliage, but established plants can quickly regrow from the roots.

First harvest: Established plants are ready to harvest right away. During warm weather, new leaves and shoots regrow within just a few days after picking.

How many: Just 1-2 plants can provide a family with a year-round supply of fresh, healthy greens for salads and cooking.

📚 Do you have Longevity Spinach in your garden?

📚 Gynura: Longevity Spinach Superfood Recipes

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🍃 5. Black Pepper (Piper nigrum)

Show a guest this plant and the first question is usually "Wait, pepper grows on a vine?" It does. The pepper in your grinder comes from a woody climber with glossy, pointed leaves and strings of small green berries.

All four peppercorn colors come from this one plant. Black and green are picked unripe, and black is dried until it darkens. White and red are picked ripe, and white has the skin removed.

Fresh green peppercorns straight off the vine taste sharp and juicy, different from the dried kind. The leaves have a mild peppery scent. Use of the leaves varies by region. Growers wrap food in them and add them to soups, curries, chutneys, and teas.

Don't throw out your store-bought pepper yet. Expect to pick leaves for a while before the vine sets peppercorns. Plant it at the base of a sturdy post or tree trunk, and it will cling with small roots along the stem.

Size: A manageable climbing vine, easily trained on a 3-6 ft trellis. It also grows very well in containers, where regular pruning keeps it compact and easy to handle.

Cold: Protect from frost. Container growing makes this easy, since the vine can be moved indoors or into a protected area during cold weather. Reduce watering during cooler weather. Black pepper dislikes the combination of cold and wet conditions and can quickly become chlorotic when its roots stay too wet in cool weather. To fix chlorosis, apply Sunshine Superfood micro-element supplement.

First peppercorns: Usually begins producing peppercorns the following growing season once established and climbing well.

How many: Grow 2-3 vines for a more reliable harvest and a steady home supply of fresh peppercorns.

📚 What is Pepper Made From? Black, white, green, and red

📚 Watch this before cooking with black pepper

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🍃 6. Insulin Ginger (Chamaecostus cuspidatus)

Also called Insulin Plant or Fiery Costus

If you want a useful plant that keeps giving, Insulin Ginger is hard to beat. Its fresh leaves have a mild, green herbal taste, and the plant produces them generously as new shoots continually fill out the clump.

At our B-Farm in Sebring, Florida, we grow Insulin Ginger right in the ground year-round. It is vigorous and usually keeps growing through winter. If an unusually cold spell damages the foliage, the plants happily grow back from the rhizomes, just like our other gingers. During the warm growing season, a small plant can develop into a nice clump in only 2-3 weeks. It multiplies incredibly fast, too. One plant can easily become 5-10 plants within a single growing season.

Insulin Ginger is a lush tropical perennial with broad leaves arranged spirally around upright stems and bright orange flowers. It became famous as a traditional medicinal plant, particularly for its use in India for supporting healthy blood sugar. The nickname "Insulin Plant" comes from this traditional use. It does not mean the plant contains insulin.

The simplest traditional use is chewing a fresh leaf. The leaves can also be steeped for tea, finely sliced into food, or blended with water or coconut water. Their flavor is mild and herbal, not hot or spicy like culinary ginger.

Research has investigated its potential effects on blood glucose, but Insulin Ginger is not a replacement for diabetes medication. Anyone taking glucose-lowering medication should discuss regular medicinal use with their healthcare provider, since combining the two could potentially lower blood sugar too much.

Size: About 4-6 ft tall and quite spreading when left alone, both in the ground and in containers. With regular harvesting and pruning, it can easily be maintained around 4 ft. It responds very well to trimming and quickly produces fresh new leaves.

Cold:We grow it outdoors year-round in Sebring. Unusually cold weather can damage the foliage, but established plants readily regrow from the rhizomes when warm weather returns.

First harvest: Fast. During active warm-season growth, a plant can form a good leafy clump in just 2-3 weeks and responds to harvesting by quickly producing new growth.

How many: One established clump can provide plenty of leaves for a household, and it multiplies so quickly that you can easily divide it into several additional plants as it grows.

📚 Insulin Ginger: Myths vs Facts

📚 One plant today - dozens tomorrow: why gardeners love Insulin Ginger

📚 Insulin Ginger traditional remedies: Quick-n-fun exotic recipes

📚 A leaf you grow, not a pill you buy: Insulin ginger - the plant people actually use

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Growing in a Tropical Garden

All six are perennial in warm climates, and they share a few needs.

Soil. Florida sand holds water about as well as a colander. Plant these straight into it and they will struggle. The Piper species in particular need soil rich in organic matter. Before planting, work compost into a wide area, not just the hole, and keep mulch on top, pulled back slightly from the stems.

Light. La lot, betel, and black pepper grow wild in forest understory and prefer part shade or bright filtered light. Katuk and longevity spinach take more sun, but some afternoon shade helps them through a Florida summer.

Cold. Each plant tolerates cold differently, so check the Cold line in each profile. During the February 2026 Florida record freeze, these edibles performed surprisingly well in our garden. Although the foliage was damaged with 25F freeze, all of them quickly grew back from the roots. Where frost is occasional, be ready to cover them, or plant them near the house or under tree canopy.

Water. Keep the soil moist, but don't let it stay wet. The pepper relatives dislike drying out.

Picking is pruning. Each time you snip a shoot tip, the plant branches and puts out new growth. A katuk left alone gets tall and sparse. One picked every week stays full and within reach.

Vigorous growers. La lot creeps along the ground, longevity spinach sprawls, and the two vines climb anything they can hold. None are hard to manage, but they need trimming near paths and smaller plants.

Food forests. Under mango, avocado, or jackfruit trees, la lot makes an edible groundcover. Black pepper and betel can climb the trunks, the way pepper is often grown on living support trees in India and Southeast Asia. Katuk works as an understory shrub or low hedge, and longevity spinach fills the front of a bed. Deep shade under a dense canopy can be too dark, though, and tree roots compete for water and nutrients, so choose dappled spots and feed and water these plants separately.

Edible landscaping. These plants don't need a vegetable plot. Heart-shaped la lot and betel leaves look as good as many ornamental groundcovers and vines, and a pepper vine hung with green berries earns its place on a post by the patio.

Feeding

These plants make a lot of leaves, and you keep cutting them off. The regrowth needs food.

In the ground, start with compost and mulch. Then feed through the warm season with a fertilizer labeled for edible plants. Leafy growers like katuk and longevity spinach need plenty of nitrogen. Sunshine Robusta for edibles does the trick.

Small, frequent feedings work better than large, infrequent ones, especially in sand and in pots. A heavy dose can burn roots and push soft growth that attracts pests.

Container plants need feeding more often, because every watering carries nutrients out of the drainage hole. Mix into your soil a scoop of Green Magic controlled release fertilizer every six months; Sunshine Robusta liquid fertilizer for edibales is safe to apply with every watering, year around. Feed less in winter, when plants in a dim window can't use much.

Pale green leaves usually mean the plant is hungry. Yellow between the veins of new leaves, common in sandy or alkaline soil, can point to a missing micronutrient, and a fertilizer that includes micronutrients often helps.

Our Sunshine Boosters are biostimulants, not fertilizers, and they work alongside regular feeding rather than replacing it. For herbs and vegetables we recommend Sunshine Robusta for fast, vigorous growth and quick regrowth after harvesting.

📚 Sunshine Boosters Info Hub

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🌱 Growing in Pots

In cold-winter areas, all five can live in pots that move indoors.

Use containers with drainage holes and a well-draining potting mix. In summer, keep them on a patio or balcony with good light but out of harsh afternoon sun, and give betel and black pepper a small trellis or pole.

When nights drop toward 50F, bring them in to your brightest window or put them under a grow light. Keep them away from heating vents, since indoor winter air is dry. If you have cats or dogs, keep them from eating the plants.

Plan on a slow winter. Katuk may drop leaves, and longevity spinach tends to stretch in low light. La lot and betel handle indoor winters best.

☀️ The Summer Heat Advantage

Spinach grown through a hot, humid summer bolts, turns bitter, and collapses. Lettuce fares no better. Both are cool-season crops.

Katuk and longevity spinach are tropical plants. As long as you keep them watered, they usually keep producing through July and August, when those greens have given up.

Easy Ways to Cook Them

Start with dishes you already make. Katuk and longevity spinach need only a minute of heat, so add them at the end.

• Stir a handful of katuk into any noodle soup, even instant ramen.
• Wrap grilled shrimp or pork in a la lot leaf with a dab of chili sauce.
• Add chopped longevity spinach to an omelet, or put raw leaves on a sandwich.
• Fold a betel leaf around a spoonful of toasted coconut and peanuts.
• Slice black pepper leaves thin for a curry, or blend them into a chutney.
• Toss fresh green peppercorns into a stir-fry or pan sauce.

Use katuk or longevity spinach wherever a recipe calls for cooked spinach, and la lot wherever you would use a lettuce or grape leaf wrap.

🛒 ➕ Beyond Basil

Your edible garden doesn't have to look like everyone else's. A few of these plants will give you leaves most stores don't sell.

Start with one plant. If it does well, add another.