Japanese Giant Mustard

Japanese Giant Mustard, AKA Takana (高菜) or Giant Red Mustard is a beautiful large-leafed Asian salad green that ads colour and flavour to any dish.

It is a very vigorous plant with large colourful leaves (40-70cm long and 30-40cm wide) shifting from green to red/puple.

Baby leaves have a peppery flavour, similar to a gentle mustard or a mild rocket, combined with a slight sweetness and green flavour. Very good in a salad mix.

Mature leaves develop more flavour and are spicier with a bit of bitterness. Good for cooking. When cooked they loose heat and have a nutty, earthy and sweet flavour. Kind of like a spicy spinach.

It is a cold-hardy plant that keeps growing slowly through Irish winters if protected by fleece or polytunnel.

Additional Information
Asian mustard greens have a long history in South-East Asia, particularly in the regions of Japan, China and Korea where many localised landraces exists.

Takana means large leaf in Japanese and is a descriptive term used for several landrace varieties, e.g. Miike Takana or Aso Takana.  The Japanese Giant Mustard variety is allegedly selected from Japanese landraces in the 1930s–1940s, but still open-pollinated and unchanged since.

Space the plants tighter if you are growing them for baby leaves and wider if growing full size plants.