Once dismissed as wild weeds and a "poor man's food", indigenous leafy vegetables in Kenya are now becoming much more common - grown on farms, sold in markets and gracing the menus of restaurants.

At the busy Skinners Restaurant in Gachie just outside the capital, Nairobi, one employee says demand for "kienyeji" - as all local vegetable varieties are known - is higher than for other greens.

"Many people ask for kienyeji when they come here," Kimani Ng'ang'a tells the BBC, despite the fact the restaurant charges extra for them as he says they are harder to source.

Vegetables like cabbage, spinach, kale and spring greens, introduced by colonial authorities before the 1960s, are more readily available and cheaper. Spring greens are known as "sukumawiki", meaning "stretch the week" in Swahili, reflecting how they have become a daily staple.

But diners in Gachie are part of the growing wave of Kenyans who see the benefits of eating local, organically produced nutrient-rich varieties of greens.

"It detoxifies the body and is good in weight loss," says James Wathiru, who ordered "managu" - or African nightshade.

Another person told me: "It's all about its taste, which is better."

According to horticulture professor Mary Abukutsa-Onyango, this trend is reflected in government data and some of the health benefits are backed by research.

Over the last 10 years, production of local greens has doubled - with 300,000 tonnes produced by local farmers last year, she says.

It is a remarkable change in attitudes, given people used to look down on traditional crops as inferior - not realising they were often more resistant to diseases and pests, meaning they can be grown organically.

In the 1980s, when Prof Abukutsa-Onyango began her studies, she says she was perplexed to find them referred to as "weeds".

"We never learnt about African indigenous vegetables. They were calling amaranth 'pigweed' [and] spider plant, they were calling it 'spider weed'," she tells the BBC.

Her postgraduate research on traditional plants was also tricky as there was no literature about them, but she persevered and now works with the government to promote them for food security.

She says managu and other local vegetables like "mrenda" (jute mallow) and "terere" (amaranth) have more essential........

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