Kitazawa Seeds – Sustainable Market Farming

Asian Greens in October: Yukina Savoy, Tatsoi

Yukina Savoy is a very delicious cold tolerant cooking green. It grows in a rosette, like tatsoi, but bigger, less shiny, more blistered. It survives down to 10°F (-12°C) outdoors, so is a good outdoor crop in late fall. Ours is doing so well this year that we started eating outer leaves in early October, planning to eat more later. We eat from the outdoor crop from mid-October until mid-December. Outdoors, we transplant them 12″ (30 cm) apart.

Yukina Savoy outdoors in December, after several nights at 16-17°F (-8 to -9°C)
Photo Ethan Hirsh

We have also transplanted some in our hoophouse (sown 9/15) to feed us in December and January. A second sowing (9/24) will feed us in January and February. It is fast-growing in the fall, taking 21 days to reach baby size, 45 days to full size. The plants grow quite large, we transplant them at 10.5″ (26 cm) apart. They grow 12″ (30 cm) tall.

In the spring (which comes early indoors) Yukina Savoy has the advantage of being somewhat heat-tolerant – it doesn’t bolt until the middle of March in there. Of course, we aim to have eaten it all before they get a chance to bolt.

For commercial sales, the whole plants are cut, gathered and fastened with a tie. For home use, you have the option of simply taking the leaves you want for immediate use, and letting the heart of the plant continue to make more growth.

Open-pollinated Yukina Savoy.
Photo Ethan Hirsh

The photo to the left shows the open-pollinated variety we used to buy from Fedco Seeds, but sadly they no longer have that. Instead we bought a hybrid Koji from Johnnys Selected Seeds. Koji claims to be “attractive, upright, and earlier maturing than Yukina Savoy, which it replaced.” I think the “more upright” and possibly the “earlier maturing” parts are true. Attraction is in the eye of the beholder. I think Koji is less cold-hardy and less blistered than the OP type, shinier, and with greener stems.

I’ve found the OP one at Kitazawa Seeds, where it is classified as Chinese cabbage, loose head type. It’s a Brassica Rapa Pekinensis Group, for those considering saving seed.

The only photo of the Koji fully grown that we have is here on the left. This one is bolting, so it’s not a totally fair comparison.

Both types are delicious, and easy to cook.

We had been including Yukina Savoy in our hoophouse bed which has nematodes, thinking it is Brassica Juncea, which has some resistance to root knot nematodes. Back to the drawing board, on that plan!

Tatsoi is a smaller, shiny dark-green leafed plant with whiter stems. The leaves are sometimes described as “spoon-shaped” – the white stem is the spoon handle and the leaf blade is the bowl of the spoon. The plant grows as a flat rosette if it has plenty of space, but more upright if crowded as in the photo above. The flavor is milder than Yukina Savoy. In the fall, it takes 21 days for baby salads; 45 days for cooking. We don’t plant tatsoi in spring, as it would bolt before growing in our “Instant Summer” climate.

Tatsoi is also very cold-tolerant, similarly hardy to 10°F (–12°C). We no longer grow this one outdoors, because Yukina Savoy is bigger and easier. We prefer our small plants be in the hoophouse, where there are almost no weeds, and we don’t mind spending longer harvesting in winter. (More tatsoi per bucketful than Yukina Savoy = more time).

We direct sow in the hoophouse on Sept 6, one of our first fall hoophouse sowings. We sow rows 6″ apart, knowing they will get crowded. We thin into salad mixes, leaving some plants to mature at 10″ (25 cm) across for cooking greens. Tatsoi also transplants easily – I’d probably go for 6″ (15 cm) spacing if transplanting. The first sowing feeds us from 10/20 – 12/31, with thinnings for salad from Oct 8.

We make a second hoophouse sowing on November 15. This one takes 8 days to germinate. It will feed us from 2/12-3/12 (thinnings 12/27-1/21). So, altogether, we have full size tatsoi to harvest from October 25 – March 5. We usually either thin out the plants, or cut outer leaves until we see the plants are about to bolt, then cut heads.

Kitazawa Seeds have a Red Tatsoi, a Red Violet tatsoi/pak choy hybrid, with an upright habit, and several tatsoi crosses, such as Misome (a fairly recent hybrid between Komatsuna and Tatsoi); Da Cheong Chae (with qualities of both Tatsoi and Pak Choi); Choho (one of several hybrids of Komatsuna and Tatsoi); and Savoy Tatsoi (dark green, heavily savoyed leaves with pale green petioles, giving it a spinach-like appearance).

Tatsoi in the hoophouse morning mist. Photo Wren Vile

Asian Greens for August: fall senposai, winter Yukina Savoy

Brassica seedlings under insect netting.
Photo by Bridget Aleshire

In late June and early July, we sow nursery beds of brassicas for transplanting outdoors. In the photo above, the plants at this end of the bed are cabbages, but in the same bed there are also Asian greens for fall and early winter harvests. We cover the beds with ProtekNet, which I already told you about in my Asian Greens for July post.

We sow the seeds about 3/inch, sowing about a foot of nursery bed row for each 12-15 feet of final crop row we want. And we sow twice, a week apart, to cover contingencies like poor germination or needing to replace casualties a week later. We transplant them three weeks after sowing, at the end of July or in early August.

Brassica beds covered with ProtekNet insect netting.
Photo Wren Vile

We cover the beds of transplants with more ProtekNet, for the first month. This is part of our strategy for dealing with harlequin bugs. We try to have August be “No Visible Brassicas Month” – we remove the old spring brassicas, or till them under, and we keep all new brassicas under cover. We hope that a month or more with no food (except cleomes) will stymie the harlequin bugs lifecycle.

We grow Yukina Savoy for harvests from mid-October to mid-November (more on that in November), and senposai for harvests from August 20 to November. Any day now we can start harvesting senposai! Both these crops get followed by a supply from the hoophouse (more on that in late winter).

I know it’s only three months since I last wrote about senposai, and here it is again! If you ran out of seeds in the spring, or this is a new vegetable for you, hurry and order from Fedco Seeds in Maine. Their order deadline is October 31 for this year. Also available from Kitazawa Seeds or Evergreen Seeds

For fall harvests, sensposai is ready a mere 40 days from sowing, or 10 days longer if you disturbed it and transplanted, as we do. Depending on your winter climate zone, you may have time to sow for growing in a hoophouse (zone 6 or warmer), or outdoors (zone 8?). If you had a cabbage disaster, try fast-growing senposai.

An outdoor bed of young Senposai.
Photo by Wren Vile

Senposai is an F1 hybrid, so don’t try saving your own seed, if you want reliable production. It was developed in Japan, and is a cross between Japanese Mustard Spinach (Komatsuna Brassica rapa – more on this next month) and regular cabbage. Senposai has big round medium-green leaves, and an open growth habit. It needs a generous 12″–18″ spacing, unless for some reason you want to limit the generous size of the leaves. The flavor is sweet and the texture is tender. Photo by Fedco Seeds. As a Fedco customer reports:

“Customers buy it once because it looks absolutely stunning, then they buy it again because it is extremely delicious. Absurdly productive and easy to grow”

Senposai leaves are cold-tolerant down to 12F (-11C), and the core of the plant may survive 10F (-12C). Young plants can be used for salads.

Asian Greens for July: Maruba Santoh, plus sowings for fall

Young Maruba Santoh plants
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.

Harlequin bugs.
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.

Adolescent Maruba Santoh plants bunched for market.
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.

Newly transplanted Maruba Santoh.
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.

An insectary circle with borage and sunflower in a chard bed.
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.

Transplanting sweet potatoes, Sword leaf lettuce

Cow Horn okra seedlings in a Winstrip 50 plug flat in the greenhouse. Photo Kathryn Simmons — Cow Horn okra seedlings in a Winstrip 50 plug flat in the greenhouse.
Photo Kathryn Simmons

We’re making good progress with catching up on our big transplanting tasks. We’ve planted the Roma paste tomatoes, peppers, melons, okra, eggplant, yet more lettuce and over half of the sweet potatoes. After this there’s “just” the watermelons and leeks to go. Then only the roughly weekly lettuce planting until the fall brassica transplanting shifts in late July and August. In order to give our transplants the best chance of thriving, we never plant in the mornings (except leeks), and prefer to make the extra effort to plant late in the day. That way, the plants have the cool of the night to get established before being called on to photosynthesize, transpire, extract water and nutrients from the soil, deter bugs and all the many plant tasks we don’t even know about. Currently we are transplanting 4-6 pm each day, with just a small group of people so that everyone focuses on planting and we are not training new people (a feature of our big morning work shifts).

Rolling biodegradable plastic mulch by hand Photo Wren Vile — Rolling biodegradable plastic mulch by hand
Photo Wren Vile

This year we are once again planting our sweet potatoes on ridges with drip tape and biodegradable plastic mulch (bioplastic). Here’s a photo from last year:

Sweet potatoes growing on biodegradable plastic mulch Photo Brittany Lewis — Sweet potatoes growing on biodegradable plastic mulch
Photo Brittany Lewis

Sweet potato vines grow to completely cover the area and the plastic is out of sight and being digested by the soil micro-organisms. Very little hand-weeding is needed. I think last year we did one walk-through (wade-through!) weeding.

The deer have reappeared and as sweet potato leaves are one of deer’s favorite foods, we got ourselves prepared, installing two Scare Crows, one at each end of the patch. These are water sprinklers activated by motion detectors. We’ve found Scare Crows quite effective against deer. They seem to have dropped off the market. Havahart is selling the Spray Away which looks similar but I haven’t tried. They can only be used during the frost free period, because you have to leave the water supply hooked up. As sweet potatoes will only be in the garden during the frost free period, this is a good match!

Sword Leaf Lettuce Photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchange — Sword Leaf Lettuce
Photo **Southern Exposure Seed Exchange**

This spring we are trying a new lettuce variety: Sword Leaf (Yu Mai Tsai) Looseleaf Lettuce.

This is a fast growing, productive Asian lettuce. It has a sweet flavor and plenty of crunch. In our climate, I think it would not do well in summer. Better for spring and fall. We bought seed from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange You can read about it here, on this TaiwanFinn Blog. “Taiwan (and Luxembourg) Through the Eyes of a Finn”. one comment says this is known in the English-speaking world as Celtuce. But Kitazawa Seeds sells both. With celtuce, the stem is the main part eaten. With Sword Leaf it is the leaves. So I’m doubting they are the same.

Three cheers for Ruby Streaks!

This week I’ve been marveling at Ruby Streaks, a beautiful ferny dark red leafy salad vegetable growing in our hoophouse. It brings a smile to winter salad mixes, a refreshing change from all the earnest shades of green. It’s beautiful, fast-growing, productive, easy to grow, cold tolerant, sweet-tasting,slightly pungent, and the seed is not expensive, what more need I say?

Ruby Streaks is so much more colorful and interesting than actual purple mizuna. For the botanists of Asian Greens among us, Ruby Streaks is a Brassica juncea, not B. rapa var japonica, like actual mizuna.

It can be grown and used as a microgreen (cut at small seedling stage), or a baby green after 21 days, and full size after 40 days. You could lightly braise it if you wanted it cooked. The leaves are finely serrated at the baby size and very similar to mizuna at full size. The stems are green and the leaf color ranges from dark green with red veins in warmer weather, to dark maroon in winter. Right now the color is incredible.

We harvest full size leaves by “crew-cutting” one side of each plant with scissors, then chopping them into short lengths. The plants regrow quickly.

It germinates quickly. Fedco warns that it bolts more readily than mizuna. We only grow it in the winter, when nothing is inclined to bolt, so this hasn’t been an issue for us. If you want to sow for spring, I’d recommend starting early in flats or pots indoors, and then transplanting at 4-5 weeks of age, about a month before the last frost date. Use rowcover for a few weeks.

To start in summer for a fall outdoor crops, you could again use flats, or you can make an outdoor nursery seed bed, protected with hoops and rowcover or ProtekNet insect netting from Fedco or from Purple Mountain Organics in Maryland. In hot weather it’s easier to keep outdoor beds damp compared to flats with a small amount of soil in them. We start ours 6/26 – the same dates we use for sowing fall broccoli and cabbage. The last sowing date is about 3 months before the first frost date. Transplant at 3-4 weeks of age, preferably not older. We haven’t tested out the cold-hardiness of Ruby Streaks, but I would expect it to survive at least down to 25F (-4C), the temperature mizuna is good to.

But the hoophouse in winter is where Ruby Streaks really shines! Double layers of inflated plastic provide enough protection in our climate for Ruby Streaks to grow all winter. And I do mean make actual growth, not just rest up waiting for spring! For winter salad mixes, we sow on 9/24 in an outdoor nursery bed, then plant into the hoophouse 10/24 (4 weeks old). We harvest that 11/1-1/25, by only cutting down one side of the plant at a time. After we clear that crop, we sow radishes in the space. We sow a second round of Ruby Streaks and mizuna inside the hoophouse 11/9, thin it into the salad, and then harvest from it 1/27-3/6.

Seed is available from Fedco, Johnny’s Seeds, Territorial, High Mowing, Kitazawa, and other seed suppliers. Fedco sells 1/2 oz Organically Grown seed for $5.20.

Ruby Streaks from Johnny's Seeds — Ruby Streaks from Johnny’s Seeds

There are relatives of Ruby Streaks, such as Scarlet Frills, Golden Frills, Red Splendor (Johnny’s) and Red Rain,and the beautiful Wild Garden Pungent Mix