I've grown it. It is okay, nothing spectacular, and performance varies with the weather. It tolerates some heat, but not really our worst summer heat particularly in combination with drought. I'm thinking New Zealand must be cooler in summer than southcentral OK. It does kinda taste like spinach, but can get a bitterness to it in hot, dry weather. I like Red Malabar vining spinach better.

All my cool-season winter greens were planted outside in January and February. Some are getting pretty big---almost full-sized in the case of some of the lettuce varieties. We're harvesting using the cut-and-come-again method.

I sowed lettuce every couple of weeks beginning around mid-January. I put the last of those lettuce plants in the garden about 2 weeks ago. Last week I sowed 5 or 6 varieties (mostly Batavian/Summercrisp types) in flats to use as succession plantings as the early lettuces mature. Some of those may go into the ground or into the large garden containers in a couple of weeks. It depends on what the current lettuce is doing and it depends on how fast the seedlings grow. Lettuce has been growing shockingly fast in the heat.

We also have spinach, being harvested as baby spinach leaves now, collard greens, Swiss chard and kale, all of them new winter/spring plantings, not overwintered ones. Other than succession plantings of lettuce, this is the dead zone for me, when all the cool-season crops are planted and it is still too cold at night to start planting the warm-season crops (except for the early tomatoes and peppers already in two small beds). After this weekend's cold nights pass, I'll keep an eye on my soil temperatures and possibly start thinking about planting corn and beans if the weather doesn't stay cold next week. I don't usually plant summer greens like malabar spinach until May, because most years my summercrisp varieties of lettuce plants stay in production until sometime in June as long as I keep them well-watered. I usually have at least half my lettuce plants in containers so I can move them into increasingly shadier areas as the weather heats up, and this can help keep them producing a bit longer too.

When gardening sources say plants withstand heat well, that often does not mean they withstand our heat well, but rather that the maybe can tolerate the summer heat in zones cooler than ours. Most years, though, New Zealand spinach, Malabar spinach (red or green) and Egyptian spinach will produce through some of all of our summers, though some people don't like their flavor and/or texture, so you have to experiment to see which ones you like.