Dear Gardeners,
As you can see from previous posts with slide shows, our DIGS garden is doing just wonderfully.
Oh sure, there's a tiny stunted squash problem in bed no.1, but hey; we don't want to be all perfect or anything; we have to fail at Easy crops sometimes, just to keep ourselves from getting too proud....ha ha. :>D
Here's something to think about though, while we're being 95% successful, and want to plan for year round planting, what about those incredibly difficult nomenclatural greens called Asian Vegetables?
They grow well here on the coast, and were featured in this month's newsletter from WCS.
Check out the excerpt below.
Best,
Jen
For those interested in year round vegetable gardening, here is a good quality article from West Coast Seeds about planting Asian vegetables now, for fall and winter eating.
From this month's newsletter at: WestCoastSeeds
About Asian Vegetables
Don't let the names scare you off! These vegetables are tasty, nutritious, fast, and some of the easiest to grow. Use the young leaves raw in salads, or chopped into soups, or cook them as you would spinach - a quick steam will do it. Better yet, use them in stir-fries with a bit of minced garlic.
Not too long ago, most of the vegetables we think of as "Asian" seemed altogether foreign. Over the last decade, however, it became commonplace to see snow peas and pac choi on the shelves of even the chain supermarkets. As time passes, we'll probably begin to see pac choi's sister choi sum appear, a better selection of the Chinese cabbage known as sui choi, along with gai lan, and the mustards.
The leafy greens from Asia include many that are incredibly cold tolerant. They do not require warm soil to germinate, and some of them can even be grown in partial shade. With a simple cloche setup over the row or raised bed, a number of these vegetables will grow better than any others throughout winter. They grow well in a variety of soil conditions, too - just keep them watered and weeded, and your winter greens will do the rest.
For a new Western gardener, trying to get a handle on the world of Chinese and Asian vegetables can be a baffling ordeal. Is it pac choi, or bok choy? Worse, there is no standard reference to work from! Open ten books on the subject of Asian greens, and you'll find ten different spellings for each. Many differences between spoken Mandarin and spoken Cantonese, for instance, are tonal (just think of the different variations on one syllable: mha, ma, maa, mah). Chinese words are written in English by means of a system called romanization, and over the centuries, several systems of romanization have been used, including the Wade-Giles system, the Yale system, and the Hanyu Pinyin system -- which has been the standard since 1982. But each of these systems produced different results.
Here's a simplified guide to some of our favourites:
Amaranth: This plant is a close cousin of beets, quinoa, and spinach. There are masses of varieties of amaranth, and nearly all of them have edible leaves, but look for the Red Leaf type known as een choi (Amaranthus tricolor). Even as the plant matures, the new leaves are always tender and delicious, plus they contain more vitamins and minerals than beet greens! Amaranth makes a sensible alternative to spinach during the heat of summer, as it doesn't bolt like spinach does.
Gai Lan: The literal translation of gai lan is "mustard orchid," which speaks to the subtle mustard flavour of the leaves. Harvest the broccoli-like stalks with leaves and flower buds intact by cutting them at ground level. Quickly stir-fry some minced garlic in hot peanut oil, and then add a bunch of gai lan. Turn this quickly, and add a splash of oyster sauce and vegetable stock. By the time the leaves are wilted, it will be heated through and ready to serve with rice or noodles. Yum!
Sui Choi: Chinese cabbages (sometimes called Napa cabbage - as well as hakusai, michihili, wong bok, and pe tsai) grow like upright, barrel-shaped cabbages, with the same sweet/bitter taste and versatility in the kitchen. It's excellent raw or cooked, and it's packed with nutrients. The michihili types are tall, and the true napa types are squat. Plant some mid-summer for a very easy fall harvest.
Mustards: This is a really big, diverse group of plants, but it includes the inseparable pair mizuna and mibuna, Chinese mustard known as dai gai choi, the so-called spinach mustard tah tsai, and the incredible vegetable komatsuna. Mizuna has deeply-cut, feathery leaves, and mibuna has rounded, spoon-shaped leaves, but both are fast to germinate, fast to grow, and EASY. Both are tasty, with a very mild heat to them. For more heat, go for dai gai choi, which brings a wonderful background taste to mixed stir-fries. Tah tsai looks like very low growing rosettes of pac choi, with the same succulent, crunchy stems, but with a slightly stronger mustard flavour. Komatsuna is the Maserati of the vegetable world, maturing from seed in 40 days! It is tolerant of quite intense cold in winter, and it's drought tolerant and slow to bolt in summer. Both the red-leaf and green-leaf types can be harvested for baby greens only three weeks after planting, and both have a nice, mild taste.
Pac choi: This vegetable should be familiar to everyone - but it's available in many forms. Shanghai pac choi has green stems, Taiwan pac choi has wavy, lettuce-like leaves, and there are dwarf and giant versions, too. It can be picked as a baby vegetable, while it's still buttery-tender, or grown on for chunky, crunchy stems. Its high water content means that it is super succulent and mild in flavour.
Choi sum: This is the same species as pac choi, but bred for a different growth form. Instead of forming urn-like rosettes of leaves, choi sum grows a central stem with a few leaves up its length and a rapini-like cluster of flower buds at the top. Just before the buds open is the time to harvest whole plants cut at the ground. The stems are so succulent, you'll be eating them fresh in the garden, but they're wonderful stir-fried as well.
There are lots of other vegetables that arrived from the diverse cuisines of Asia, including daikon radishes, snow peas, kabocha squash, and soya beans, but the leafy greens listed above are ideal for cool-season growing in the spring and fall. Plant some this month and enjoy them right through the fall!
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For 4 to 5 articles like this per month (including tomato varieties being tested, tasted, and written up) subscribe to West Coast Seed Newsletter here.
Another great article with photos is the one on how to tell male and female zucchini blossoms apart. Enjoy!
Best,
Jen
