Mustard Greens For Eating Cooked
A family of easily-grown greens from the mustard family. Raw they are spicy – so although it is nice to put small quantities raw in salads, they’re mostly used cooked.
When you cook them most of the heat disappears, leaving a rich, full flavour, with just a little spicy zing. They are especially useful because they grow so well in cooler weather. Apart from the great taste, an advantage of these is that they are left alone by many pests – they’re only attractive to animals that know how to cook!
‘Golden Frills’ salad mustard-kale
A whole new class of vegetable here – a unique salad leaf from a cross between a kale and mustard.
The plants make large but delicately lacey leaves with a golden-green colour, and a sweet, but only slightly spicy flavour.
It goes well in salads as the lacey leaves add a delicate bit of ‘zing’. Can also be cooked as a green.
Great new salad ingredient.
200 seed, organic. £2.38Sowing Information
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Dragons Tongue
A great new mustard green. It has huge leaves with amazing wiggly white ribs and purple highlights.
It is mildish when young and small quantities can be added raw to salads. As it gets bigger it gets hotter raw, and then is really nice cooked, leaving just a slight spicy tingly richness in the flavour.
We grow this every year using it young in winter salads then as it matures cooking it in stirfries, curries and as a side-dish.
Sweet when young, very big and productive.
400 seed, organic. £2.38
Sowing Information
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Green Wave
Big green leaves with frilly edges - Green Wave is great because it not only thrives in cool weather, but is also relatively tolerant of heat, so can be sown both in spring & after midsummer.
It is really, really impressively cold-hardy. Not only can you extend the season in a polytunnel, but also we find that plants left outdoors often overwinter perfectly well, making a good crop of leaves in spring.
All in all, a hardy and easily grown plant, making masses of cooking greens. When it finally does run to seed, the flower shoots are very nice cooked like sprouting broccoli, too!
Hot and spicy raw, tasty and mild cooked.
200 seed, organic. £2.32Sowing Information
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Osaka Purple
This is a deep purple mustard green, with amazingly huge oval leaves that are purple and green with white veins. They make a big rosette and eventually a heart as well.
We like this because it is cold-hardy - sow it after midsummer for use overwinter.
This nice seed from Frank & Karen Morton was specifically bred for home gardeners. It is a particularly vigorous variety, growing on well even in less than ideal weather, and very cold-hardy, standing on into winter.
Hot and spicy raw, tasty and mild cooked.
200 seed, organic. £2.29Sowing Information
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Wa Wa Ga Choi Stem Mustard (a.k.a. “The Thing”)
So, definitely our strangest vegetable, a unique sort of plant from Szechuan in China, where it is famous. How on earth to describe it?
The stem swells up like a kohl-rabi but making lots of bumps rather than one big one. The stem and leaves can be used sliced in salads, cooked, pickled or stirfried. The flavour is delicious, savoury and somewhat - but not very - spicy. It's also excellent as a kimchi-style ferment with garlic, ginger & chilli.
It makes leaves quite quickly, say 4 or five weeks to a reasonable plant size; then it makes the swollen stem which should be ready roughly 3-4 months later.
A fantastic crop to grow overwinter for harvesting when other crops are scarce.
350 seed, organic. £2.27Sowing Information
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