Asian greens are easy to grow and delicious to eat
Cut your costs — and your waistline — by growing vitamin-packed Asian greens in your garden. Here’s what you need to know.
IF YOU’RE like me, all this isolation of recent months has had an alarming effect on the waistline.
The biscuit barrel has been too convenient during times of emotional claustrophobia, and those “healthy” protein bars have become an all-too-frequent sugar hit.
That’s why our family (mainly me) is shaping up with a regimen of healthy eating. We have pledged that from now most of those heat ’n’ eat packet meals are banished, replaced by healthier stir-fries.
As part of this crusade I’ve been furiously sowing a selection of leafy green Asian vegies.
Traditional stir-fry vegetables like beans, carrots and capsicum are fine but I figure these low-calorie, vitamin-packed leafy greens will ramp up the vitamin count without enlarging the tummy.
The clincher with Asian greens is that many are a cinch to grow, and they grow quickly.
While many Asian vegies now can be bought as seedlings, I prefer to sow seed in-situ because the resulting plants inevitably are longer lived — and they’re cheaper.
Seed is best sown in autumn, but give them good frost protection and quite a few will happily grow over winter months, so long as they are in a warmish area protected from chilly blasts. Most appreciate good, rich, well worked soil, regular watering and five or six hours of sun a day. A trick some commercial growers use to speed up germination is to apply a mix of half a teaspoon of Epsom salts and two litres of water to the sown seed.
My favourite Asian vegie to grow is the brassica bok choy, sometimes called Chinese white cabbage, with its delicately flavoured, crispy stalks. This white-stemmed, vase-shaped vegie is a winner in soups as well as stir-fries and can also be steamed.
Bok choy is almost identical to pak choy except it’s bigger and generally has white stems, while pak choy’s are greenish.
Give seedlings a fortnightly feed of a nitrogen-rich liquid fertiliser to keep them growing quickly and water frequently.
This year I’m experimenting with germinated seed in a few polystyrene boxes filled with potting mix containing a couple of handfuls of manure and complete fertiliser.
The boxes are on a sheltered suntrap area of a veranda. I’ll keep them there to mature, for harvesting in about eight weeks. Once winter frosts have lessened, I’ll follow up with direct sowings in the vegie patch.
Bok choy is prone to bolting, especially in up-and-down weather conditions, so it pays to leave a couple of plants to flower, then harvest the seed once flowers have dried for sowing next year.
With most Chinese greens, it’s best to sow a line of seed and, once seedlings are up, thin them to the required spacing.
Other Asian favourites worth growing are:
GAILAN (Chinese broccoli): A bittersweet leafy green used for its flowering stems, it’s best picked young, then boiled or steamed and drizzled with oyster sauce, or used in stir-fries and soups. Unless you’ve got hothouse conditions, hold off sowing seed until spring.
CHOY SUM: Often called Chinese flowering cabbage, it’s a bright stemmed, yellow-flowered brassica whose flowering shoots and juvenile leaves are a treat lightly steamed, boiled or in stir-fries and salads. Grow it year-round in rich soil that drains well.
WOMBOK (Chinese cabbage): A favourite in Chinese cooking, it’s sweet and crunchy with tightly packed leaves and a central core. It looks like cabbage but tastes a little sweeter. Grow from seed sown in spring and use in salads, coleslaws, stir-fries and soups, or steam and add a sauce as a side dish.
WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK
PLANT celery, lettuce, peas, silverbeet, snow peas and spinach.
BOOST asparagus and rhubarb supplies by lifting and dividing well established clumps.
CONTINUE planting bare-root roses and fruiting and ornamental trees while the soils are still moist and welcoming.
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