How to grow mizuna
If you want a salad green that won’t give up on you over winter, then grow mizuna, writes Sheryn Dean.
Some people call it mizuna lettuce, because this nice leafy green can be harvested a handful at a time to add to salads, but mizuna is actually a mild mustard from the brassica family and a cousin to the turnip.
Mizuna translates from Japanese to ‘‘water greens’’ and has a host of other names including kyona, shui cai, Japanese mustard greens, Japanese greens or spider mustard.
It has been cultivated in Japan for centuries where it is traditionally pickled as a condiment. But mizuna is a lot more than just a salad ingredient or a condiment; it is flavoursome enough to carry a range of dishes, from pasta (pair it with parmesan) to risotto (pair it with mushrooms).
It can be sauteed by itself, but my favourite ways to cook it are to combine it with spinach, or add it into a vegetable or creamy chicken and noodle soup towards the end of cooking.
The younger the leaves, the less cooking it requires and the milder the flavour.
Like all leafy greens, it is medicine for you and your liver and contains lots of phytonutrients, minerals, fibre and vitamins, warding off Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, cancer and just about everything else except the tax department. Its best feature for me is that it grows all by itself through the winter cold and is available when other greens have the better sense to hibernate.
including a red one, which I like to grow just for the colour it adds to a salad. Kings Seeds sells ‘Red Coral’.
Mizuna can be grown in pots on a window sill, in trays to use as microgreens, sown in situ or cosseted first in trays and then transplanted.
It has the best flavour and shape when grown in full sun with moist, fertile soil. Just don’t fertilise it or let it dry out as this will cause it to bolt to seed.