of the vegetables and herbs used in Asia are familiar to Westerners. In fact, we enjoy many cucumbers and winter squash varieties without even being aware that they come from Japanese breeding programs. Many of the so-called English cucumbers are examples. When you peruse seed catalogs looking for varieties, keep an eye out for sweet, “burpless” cucumbers such as ‘Suyo Long’ and ‘Orient Express’ and for dense, flavorful, nonstringy, sweet winter squash varieties such as ‘Sweet Dumpling,’ ‘Red Kuri,’ and ‘Green Hokkaido.’ Asian gardeners also breed and grow such familiar vegetables as eggplants, carrots, and turnips. Basic information on some of these vegetables is given in “The Encyclopedia of Asian Vegetables.” Still, many Asian vegetables and herbs are unfamiliar to Western cooks and gardeners and it is on these that I concentrate most of my attention.
In much of Asia, land for cultivation is scarce and highly revered. Unlike many Western gardeners and farmers, who often mine the organic matter from the soil and then rely on chemical fertilizers, out of necessity, Eastern gardeners have recycled nutrients for eons. In fact, they are responsible for developing some of the techniques gardeners refer to collectively as intensive gardening.
When I started gardening in the 1960s, sterile, flat soils supplemented with chemical fertilizers and broad-spectrum pesticides were de rigueur. Trained as an environmentalist and a horticulturist, I questioned these techniques, and by the late 1970s I was a strong advocate of recycling, composting, raised beds, and organic fertilizers and pest controls. Always on the lookout for others of like mind, in the early 1980s I visited with Peter Chan, who gardened at that time in Portland, Oregon. Peter had long been a proponent of an intensive style of vegetable gardening, which he covered in detail in his book Better Vegetable Gardens the Chinese Way. Raised in China and trained in agriculture there, Peter wrote of cultural techniques used in China for centuries, including the raised-bed system that promotes good drainage, supplementing soil with organic matter, and composting. Comparing notes with Peter, I found I had instinctively been using numerous time-proven Chinese gardening techniques.
The gardens described in this book, and many of the gardening techniques described in the Appendices, were primarily grown in the Chinese manner—methods now accepted by many modern gardeners worldwide. In addition, I include information on growing greens in what is called the cut-and-come-again method. (See the discussion of my stir-fry garden on page 11 for details.) While not widely practiced in Asia, this method fits right in, as it takes advantage of small spaces.
When I first became interested in Asian vegetables, I was most drawn to Chinese varieties and cooking methods, and I still find them a great place to start for beginners and for gardeners in cooler climates. But in the last decade the gardens and cooking of Southeast Asia have caught my fancy and I now also experiment with Thai chiles and basils, Vietnamese coriander, lemon grass, and cilantro, among others. Most of these plants are perennials, and while finally becoming more available in nurseries, as they are native to warm climates they are less hardy; most gardeners, including myself, must bring them in over the winter. While they can be a challenge, they are well worth the effort.
The following sections detail both cool-season and warm-season gardens. Most are in my northern California USDA Zone 9 garden, but David Cunningham’s Vermont garden offers time-proven techniques for growing in a colder climate. In “The Encyclopedia of Asian Vegetables,” I give copious information on growing all the vegetables in the coldest climates as well as in the semitropical regions, where some of the specialties of Southeast Asia will do especially well. For detailed soil preparation, composting, crop rotation, starting from seeds, transplanting, maintenance, and pest-control information, see Appendices A and B.
A typical Asian harvest (right) includes Asian eggplants, pac choi, bitter melon, and shallots.
Creasy asian gardens
I live in an unusually good climate for growing cool-season (fall, winter, and spring) vegetables, but it is only so-so for warm-season ones. My garden is in USDA Zone 9, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Ocean—even less from the San Francisco Bay. The marine influence means winter temperatures seldom sink into the low twenties, with daytime averaging in the fifties. In summer, often the fog doesn’t burn off until midmorning, daytime temperature averages in the high seventies, and most nights are in the high fifties. The moderate winter temperatures are perfect for peas, carrots, root vegetables, greens, and all members of the cabbage family, but summer temperatures are borderline for peppers, eggplants, yard-long beans, and some semitropical herbs.
Over the years, I’ve experimented with hundreds of Asian varieties of vegetables, growing them in small beds by themselves or tucking individual plants in among my lettuces, beans, and tomatoes, but I became inspired to grow a whole garden of Asian vegetables over a twelve-month period, all done specifically for this book.
To give the gardens the feel of Asia, I used bamboo for fencing and trellises and selected rice straw for the paths. The plants were grown in straight rows, which is typical of most Asian gardens, and the beds were raised and formed into geometric patterns. I moved my decades-old Japanese maple into the garden for a focal point, and Edith Shoor, an accomplished ceramist, provided some of her Asian-style pottery for decorative touches here and there. The process was great fun and it entirely transformed my front-yard vegetable garden.
I have incredibly good soil. Of course I should. After twenty years of adding organic mulches and lots of loving care—such as never walking on the beds, planting cover crops, and adding chicken manure from my “ladies” every year—I can dig a hole using only my bare hands.
Shown in the photo to the right are some typical Asian ingredients: Winter melon; Southeast Asian green and white and yellow round, and long purple eggplants; lemon grass; luffa; white bitter melons; and bitter melon vines. One of many Creasy cool-season, frontyard gardens is shown on the opposite page, above. Snow peas are trained on string tepees and Shanghai pac choi and tatsai are growing in the front bed. The harvest from the garden (opposite, below) includes snow peas, Japanese red mustard, leek flowers leaves, and pac chois.
The Creasy Cool-Season Vegetable Garden
In late August, my crew and I started seeds of pac choi, mustards, and golden celery in flats to transplant into the garden. In late September, the seeds of snow and pea shoot peas, coriander, fava beans, daikons, Japanese varieties of carrots and spinach, shungiku greens, and bunching onions were all planted directly in the garden. We had good germination on all of the plants, but the slugs went after the coriander seedlings and they needed replanting three times. All went well until January, when we had seven nights in a row that went down to 23°F. Now that’s real cold for us Californians and the fava beans burned back to the ground and some of the half-grown pea plants were so weakened we took them out. The cold weather continued into April (March was the coldest on record, with few days climbing out of the forties) and the whole garden was almost a month behind. But it’s amazing how resilient cool-season plants are. The fava
