Leaves & salads
Asian salad greens
Brassica rapa var. japonica
Timings for your region
Suggested: Moderate · Explained in the glossary
Sow outdoorsearly August – mid September
Harvestmid September – late November
Practical tip
Still growing when almost everything else has stopped — the mustardy heat mellows with the cold. Ideal for a cleared summer bed.
Origin & history
Asian salad greens cover several Asian leafy brassicas, most of them forms of Brassica rapa that have been grown as vegetables in Japan, China and Korea for centuries — mizuna, for instance, is documented in Japanese sources from the Edo period. They only reached German gardens in the 1990s, when seed catalogues and the first baby-leaf mixes brought them into home plots. Botanically they are the same species as the turnip and Chinese cabbage, which explains why they respond to long days in the same way: by flowering.
Varieties
Ready-made mixes and single varieties sit side by side on the seed rack. Mizuna has finely cut, mild leaves; red mustard (“Red Giant”) broad red-purple ones with a distinct heat; tatsoi forms a flat rosette of dark spoon-shaped leaves and stands in the bed longest of all. Almost all Asian greens are open-pollinated and the seed is cheap — you can sow generously and follow up every two weeks.
Care
An August sowing only germinates if the surface stays evenly moist; in heat it helps to water the drill before sowing and shade the row until the seedlings are up. Sow thinly and thin to about 10 cm — in a crowded stand the plants stay small and rot from below in a wet autumn. No extra feeding is needed: as a follow-on crop in a cleared bed, what the previous crop left behind is enough. Cut about 4 cm above the ground instead of pulling the plants and you get two or three cuts from the same roots.
What can go wrong
Spring sowings almost always bolt — these greens flower under long days, which is why the sowing window does not open until August. In a warm late summer flea beetles pepper the young leaves with holes; insect netting from the day of sowing plus a surface kept damp keeps them off reliably. They are brassicas, so they belong in the cabbage rotation: not straight after cabbage in the same bed, or you are feeding clubroot.
Harvest, storage & kitchen
The leaves taste best at about hand length; big old ones turn tough and their midribs go stringy. Cut across the whole stand with scissors, well above the heart, and it will regrow. Raw, the mustard note dominates; wilted briefly in a pan or stirred into finished soup it becomes restrained. None of it stores — pick what you need for the day.
All timings are guide values for the given climate, not a guarantee. Weather, aspect and variety all have a say.