How to grow mustard greens

Mustard greens are a fast-growing leafy green in the cabbage family, grown for large, lobed leaves with a distinct peppery bite, some tinged purple at the base. Young leaves are mild enough to eat raw in a salad, while mature leaves are usually cooked, which softens the sharpness. The plant belongs to a cool-season bed, going in early enough to size up before summer heat, or again in late summer for a fall crop, and grows quickly enough to fill a gap between plantings. Because the whole plant, leaves and seed pods, is edible, gardeners can harvest it in stages rather than pulling it all at once.

The hardest part of growing mustard greens well is timing them around heat. North Carolina State University Extension notes that as a cool-season plant it does best in fall and spring, bolting and developing a strong flavor once summer arrives. A second-year gardener who treats mustard like a warm-weather green, planting it alongside tomatoes in late spring, finds the plants shoot up a flowering stalk within weeks instead of filling out. Heat and moisture stress push the flavor toward bitter and hot, so the harvest that comes in is unpalatable raw, right when the bed should be producing its heaviest cut.