Warty, fuzzy, hot and tangy — some garden vegetables fairly scream “serve me to your best friends!”
The thrill of fresh Asian vegetables is not all Napa cabbage and snow peas: It’s yard-long beans, bitter melon and mustardy pak choi. Grow these exotic delights at home; they’re easy, requiring the same care you’d give cucumbers, beans or greens.
Both pak choi and tatsoi are leafy vegetables used in stir fry, soups and salads. Plant in spring when the weather is cool and shade the plants with overhead trellises once the weather warms. These heavy feeders love composted manure or a balanced fertilizer. For baby greens, harvest at 30 days after sowing; larger heads take 50 to 60 days.
Bring on the heat with daikon, the long, lean, creamy-white Japanese radishes. Grown in shade with evenly moist soil, these roots are zesty when young and positively pungent as they get larger. Avoid giving them much nitrogen, which promotes leaves but not roots. Peel and slice raw into salads, or chop for stir fry. Daikons are ready for harvest 50 to 60 days after sowing.
Yard-long beans and edamame, the trendy soybean, are easy to grow once the weather warms. Sow every two weeks until the end of June for a continuous crop, filling in blanks with new seed (germination can be spotty). Yard-longs need a trellis to keep the 12- to 24-inch pods off the ground.
Mulch once plants are 6 inches tall to keep the soil moist, and give plants a boost of fertilizer when they begin to bloom. Harvest yard-longs young and edamame once pods swell, but before they mature. Pick as they’re swelling to get the hang of harvesting, plucking one or two daily to taste them. When perfect, pick the entire crop — edamame plants ripen all at once.
Fuzzy squash, also called hairy melon, has cylindrical fruits covered in a peach fuzz of soft bristles. Grow as you would any squash, but give these a trellis to climb and they’ll shade your tender Asian greens. Harvest the fruit young, when the squash are 6 inches long for sweetest flesh. Peel and cut into chunks for steaming or stir-frying, or scoop out and stuff larger squash with fillings for baking.
A warty relative of cucumbers and squash, bitter melon is a fast-growing vine that loves to climb. Like its cousins, it loves warm weather, so plant seeds after all danger of frost. Give this plant a trellis to grow on to keep fruit from touching the soil, then water and fertilize as you would cucumbers.
Harvest the fruit eight to 10 days after flowering; the older it gets, the stronger the bitterness of the melon. In general, fruits 4 to 6 inches long are at peak flavor.
Reach Carol O’Meara, a local gardening expert, at omearac@yahoo.com or on her blog .
Plant your own
Where to get them
Kitazawa Seed Co.:
Botanical Interests:
New Dimension Seed:
