onions, daikons, and many greens had revived from their sad-looking state and were producing beautifully. Most of the mustards and the pac choi were played out and the bunching onions were gone by midMarch. Baby turnips, different greens, and new onions were planted to fill in the beds before the summer crops could be planted.
Another Creasy cool-season Asian gardenis shown opposite, above. In November, the beds in my USDA Zone 9 garden are filled with seedlings of mustards, daikons, pac chois, and Japanese carrots ready for thinning. A few months later (opposite, below), the beds are ready for harvesting. The cool-season garden in May is pictured on this page. The fava beans on the left are starting to produce, the snow peas and spinach are in full production, the mizuna is in full bloom and attracting beneficial insects by the drove; and a second planting of greens is ready for harvest.
Stir-fries with gai lon, snow peas, and carrots, and dumpling soups with pac choi and mustards were favorite dishes in my house. I had never made them with pea shoots or with gai lon before, and they are great. New to me were the daikons, shungiku greens, and burdock. As I don’t especially enjoy radishes, I was pleasantly surprised to experience their mild, almost sweet taste in a pork soup my neighbor, Helen Chang, taught me to make, and I enjoyed the daikon pickles made with carrots as well. Helen also showed me how to cook fava beans in the Chinese manner by stir-frying them with garlic and letting visitors peel their own beans as a snack, making them easy to prepare. The shungiku greens were lovely made with a sesame dressing and their flowers created a smoky, mild tea. The burdock was great in a beef roll; I plan to grow it again next year to explore more recipes that feature it. In all, the garden expanded my Asian repertoire. Next winter, I am sure to plant more daikons and fava beans. This garden almost made winter so great I will look forward to the cool temperatures. Well, maybe that’s an overstatement.
Plants in the Cool-Season
Creasy Asian Garden
Bunching onion: ‘Evergreen’
Burdock: ‘Takinogawa’
Carrot: ‘Japanese Kuroda,’ ‘Tokita’s Scarlet’
Celery: ‘Chinese Golden’
Chinese chives: ‘Chinese Leek Flower’
Chinese kale: ‘Blue Star,’ ‘Green Delight’
Coriander: ‘Slo-Bolt’
Daikon: ‘Mino Early,’ ‘Red Meat’
Gai lon
Japanese onion: ‘Kuronobori’
Mizuna
Mustard: ‘China Takana,’ ‘Osaka Purple’
Mustard spinach: ‘Komotsuna’
Pac choi: ‘Mei Qing,’ Tatsoi
Peas: ‘Snow Pea Shoots’
Shungiku: ‘Round Leaf
Snow peas: ‘Sopporo Express’
Spinach: ‘Tamina Asian’
Turnips: ‘Market Express’
The Pleasures of a Stir-fry Garden
In the early 1960s, if you were interested in cooking, Cambridge, Massachusetts was a great place to be. Two of this country’s doyennes of cuisine held court there: Julia Child and Joyce Chen. Both were filming television shows, and Joyce, author of The Joyce Chen Cook Book, was teaching Chinese cooking classes at her restaurant. Living there, I caught the bug and I learned everything—from folding wontons to making béarnaise sauce. From Joyce, I learned one of the most valuable cooking skills you can acquire—how to stir-fry—which became especially pertinent years later, when I became a demon vegetable gardener. Vegetables are the stars of most stir-fries. As a bonus, the recipes are easily varied; one tablespoon of peas or a cup, it seldom matters.
Many years later, after having moved to California, the impetus for creating a specific stir-fry garden was set in motion. I shared a small, sunny part of my garden with a young neighbor, Sandra Chang. As fall approached, it occurred to us, as her mother, Helen, and I used much of my harvest for stir-frying, and so many Asian vegetables grow best in cool weather, that a garden of all stir-fry vegetables would be fun.
Together we chose ‘Joi Choi,’ a full-size, vigorous pac choi; ‘Dwarf Gray’ snow peas and ‘Sugar Snap’ peas; spinach; tatsoi and ‘Mei Qing’ dwarf pac choi; onions; carrots; cilantro; shungiku; ‘Shogun’ broccoli, and a stir-fry mix from Shepherd’s Garden Seeds containing many different mustards and pac choi. (Winters here seldom go below 28°F; gardeners in cold winter areas would do best to plant these vegetables in early spring.) I planted no Chinese cabbages, however; mine always become infested with army worms and root maggots.
We started seeds of broccoli and pac choi in August in a flat and direct-seeded the peas in the garden in September. My garden beds are rich with organic matter, so all we added was blood meal before planting. We had extra seeds of many of the greens, so we planted them in containers and grew them on my back retaining wall to see how well they would do. (They grew very well—we fertilized them with fish emulsion every four weeks.) The Shepherd stir-fry mix we planted in a little square of soil, about three by three feet, using the cut-and-come-again method. We prepared the soil well and broadcast the seeds like grass seeds, covered them lightly with soil, firmed them in place, and watered them in. We kept the bed moist and had great germination. We didn’t thin it, and the seedlings grew problem free—except for occasional slugs, which I controlled by making a few nighttime forays with a flashlight. The vegetables were ready for harvesting at about three inches tall. Using scissors, we snipped our way across the bed an inch above the ground, harvesting as much as we needed at a time. We found these baby greens great for salads and added at the last minute to stir-fries. We fertilized the bed with fish emulsion after harvesting and were able to harvest the greens a second time a month later.
A close up (opposite) of one of the cool-season beds with gobo and Shanghai pac choi to the left of the bird bath and mustard greens and cilantro on the right. A cut-and-come-again bed of stir-fry greens (below) is almost ready for harvesting.
The rest of the beds gave us more than enough vegetables for both families to have a stir-fry or two every week for about three months—great meals of carrot and snap pea stir-fries, chicken with broccoli, tatsoi with ginger, mixed greens with mushrooms and garlic, and oh so many more. Since that stir-fry garden, I have grown many smaller versions and still find them among the most satisfying cool-season gardens.
My stir-fry garden produced far more produce than my husband and I could ever use. My friend Henry Tran (above) comes by to cut some greens for stir-frying. Helen Chang (below) harvests cilantro from the stir-fry garden. A harvest from the Creasy stir-fry garden is shown on the opposite page.
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