
Photo by Ethan Hirsh
In June I told you about Tokyo Bekana, a light green tender-leaved, white-stemmed green which can be cooked, or used as a substitute for lettuce in hot weather. Because summer in Virginia is a hard time for leafy greens, July’s Asian green is very similar – Maruba Santoh. Maruba Santoh has smoother, wavy, less ruffled leaves than Tokyo Bekana.
To show you I’m not being a slouch, I’ll include some pointers on sowing Asian greens for fall, because now is the time – in our climate at least. Here’s what one of my favorite seed suppliers, Fedco Seeds has to say:
Maruba Santoh (35 days) Brassica rapa (pekinensis group) Open pollinated. With Maruba you get four vegetables in one. The loose round vibrant chartreuse leaves provide a mild piquant mustardy flavor while the flat white stems impart a juicy crisp pac choy taste. High-end chefs like to use the blossoms. Market grower Scott Howell finds the flavor more subtle and complex than that of other greens and cuts Maruba small for his mesclun. Fairly bolt tolerant, so plant after the early spring flea beetle invasion subsides.

Photo University of Maryland Extension Service
Fedco is in Maine and we’re in Virginia, so things are a little different. The information on their website about pests and diseases is good. Our worst brassica pests are harlequin bugs.
We grow our summer brassica seedlings and transplanted Asian greens under ProtekNet on hoops. On the Dubois link, study the Dimensions and Specifications tab, then download the brochure from that tab. Study the Descriptions tab – it tells you which insects are excluded by each size mesh. Be sure that you choose the right size mesh for the bugs you want to exclude. Flea beetles and thrips are small – you need a small mesh. Johnny’s is now marketing the close-mesh ProtekNet as “Biothrips” insect netting, and they also have a comparison chart of rowcover and insect netting on their site.

Photo Kitazawa Seeds
Kitazawa Seeds also sells Maruba Santoh seed, under the Chinese Cabbage heading. Like most brassicas, Maruba Santoh does best in cool weather, although it is somewhat heat tolerant (or “warm tolerant” as we call it in Virginia.) It tolerates heat better than Napa Chinese cabbage does. To avoid bolting, keep the plants above 50F (10C) at all times, but particularly avoid prolonged spells below this “bolting trigger” temperature.
Maruba Santoh will germinate at temperatures between 50-85F. Seedlings emerge in just 3 days in summer. For summer use, direct sow, thin the rows for baby salad mix, then let the “heads” (it doesn’t actually head up) develop to full size (6-10″ tall) after about 35-40 days. Or transplant two week old starts. We tend to grow our plants quite big (12″ tall) and harvest by the leaf, several times over. Maruba Santoh makes a fine substitute for lettuce, and a tasty quick-cooking green.
To calculate sowing dates, work back 40 days from when you want to harvest, and sow more every week or two until you run into the fall slowdown temperatures, or you go back to eating lettuce in salads and cooking chard and kale. If you still have Maruba Santoh growing in the fall, know that it will be frost tolerant to 25°F (-4°C). No hurry.

Photo Ethan Hirsh
Maruba Santoh can also be grown at other times of year: spring and fall outdoors, winter in the hoophouse. The seedlings have large cotyledons and make good microgreens too.
Kitazawa’s Culinary Tips include: Use in salad, sukiyaki, ohitashi, yosenabe, stir-fry, soup and pickling. Kim chi here we come! (If we had surplus.)
Next month I will talk more about Asian greens outdoors in fall. Now is the time to sow for fall harvests. We start in late June, and sow more in early July. We always make two sowings a week apart, for insurance. We are aiming for greens to feed us in early fall, before the kale is ready, and into the winter, harvesting by the leaf. But Asian greens can be sown all the way up to two months before your first fall frost date. For us, that means August 14-20. If you want to make sowings now, consider senposai, komatsuna, pak choy, tat soi, Yukina Savoy, and Chinese cabbage.

Photo Bridget Aleshire
I have two posts on the Mother Earth News Organic Gardening Blog that I haven’t told you about yet. So if it’s too hot out, or it’s raining (don’t make me envious) seek shade and read more. The newer post is Insectaries: Grow Flowers to Attract Beneficial Insects, and the previous one is Planting Leeks.
Hi Pam, I wondering if you can give me some more details about growing fall transplants in the nursery bed. I had great luck this spring with your nursery bed idea and had great transplants with a lot less frustration than growing in flats. What are my options for covering the nursery bed, for shade and for bugs? I have row cover or a large piece of plastic screening, like you’d use for a screened porch. I’m not ready to splurge on the Proteknet yet though it does sound interesting. How tight do I need to keep the cover and what do you use to keep it tight? Do I need to lift the cover up to water? Thanks, Melissa
Hi Melissa, Fall seedling nursery beds are just like ones in spring (as we use for lettuce, I probably wrote about that in my Lettuce Varieties of the Month series.) The main difference for us is that there are more pesty bugs in summer. We use ProtekNet for brassica seedlings and shadecloth for lettuce seedlings in summer. Brassicas can germinate in quite warm temperatures, so don’t really need shade here. Lettuces don’t have pest problems here, so we don’t need netting. To keep pests out, make sure the edges of whatever cover you use are battened down well. We roll the edges round 5ft sticks. Some people use rocks or sandbags. With shadecloth it’s often better to suspend it above the plants to let in more airflow. Window screening can work as shade cloth, although it’s often not a high percentage of shade. You could double it up. Before we got ProtekNet we used rowcover for our brassica seedlings. The dangers are that it gets a bit muggy under there, and you can’t see what’s growing. All shadecloth, rowcover and insect nets can be watered through, no need to open them for that. Sounds like this is a topic I could write a whole post about!
Thanks! That helps me get going. Cleaned out the nursery bed today and looks like some cooler weather this week to get things started.