CHECKING out the price of bags of oriental greens at the supermarket is enough to make most gardeners want to grow their own. You can pay pounds for bags of mixed greens which add flavour to tangy salads and quick stir-fries, but all too often you don’t use the whole bag in one sitting, so the rest is left in the fridge until it turns into an inedible green soggy mass. It would be so much easier to pick the leaves you need straight from your garden, so there’s less waste and guaranteed freshness. With this in mind, Which? Gardening, the Consumers’ Association magazine, tested 14 types of oriental veg to see how well they can grow either in your vegetable patch or in containers on the patio. Researchers grew eight leafy vegetables in 30cm containers filled with peat-free compost. One pot of each was treated as a cut-and-come- again crop, while a second pot was left to produce larger plants. All were sown three times – in late March, late May and late July. Cut-and-come-again crops trialled included mizuna, mustard greens and amaranth, while other popular veg included pak choi, Chinese cabbage and giant radishes. Among the easiest and quickest was mizuna, which can be added to salads and stir fries and is best grown on its own as it can outgrow and swamp most other salad plants. As a baby leaf it produced 300g per pot from a March sowing from the first cut and 185g from the second cut. Summer sowings proved less prolific and the young plants were damaged by flea beetles. The tests found pak choi, delicious lightly steamed and served with garlic and oyster sauce, is easy to grow from seed although it’s slower than other oriental greens. Best results were seen from early sowing but later batches were successful so it’s worth planting throughout summer. Mustard greens, which have a strong, peppery flavour, are best used as a cut-and-come-again crop to perk up salads. The most successful sowing in the trial was the earliest sowing of the large-leaved ‘Red Giant’, as later sowings suffered from flea beetle damage. Among the most impressive- looking vegetables were mooli and beauty heart radishes. Mooli was sown in mid-July, thinned to 30cm apart and by late August had produced massive white roots weighing up to 750g each and are ideally used grated in salads. Most of the veg tested are members of the cabbage family, suffering from the same pests, so you have to be vigilant against slugs and snails, flea beetles, cabbage white caterpillars and mealy aphids. | 
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