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Growing pak choy and Chinese vegetables
Pak choy is most commonly known in western circles as a non-hearting Chinese
cabbage. Pak choy's leaves are harvested for cooking when the plant is
still reasonably immature. It's different to hearting Chinese cabbage
which is called wong bok. Or so we'd read. You see we're not writing this
with a great deal of experience or authority on Asian gardening or cooking.
We'll be brutally honest and admit we'd never really heard of pak choy
until we got our 1998 Diggers seed catalogue and it was one of the packets
of free seed we could get. The only description we had was "Harvest from
6 weeks onwards. Easy to grow." And it even had a photo. We were sold
(lets face it it was free and cost us nothing).
Growing conditions
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This wonderful fast growing and very useful Chinese vegetable grows
in almost all climates. It does very well in subtropical Queensland
in all seasons except summer.
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They love sunny well drained beds.
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Pak choy likes a heavily manured soil with a touch of lime.
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In a 4 bed rotation system pak choy
is grown with broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage, or with peas and
beans. That's because pak choy belongs to the brassica family. If
you grow these vegetables in the same spot often you're likely to
introduce club root disease to the soil - bad news.
Garden care
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It's best to directly sow pak choy seeds in the beds where they'll
grow.
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Pak choy germinates and grows rapidly.
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They're also very strong, winning our toughest vegie award when they
survived a severe hail storm with hardly a scratch.
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Feed them fortnightly with liquid manure.
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The only down side with this vegetable is it's tendency to act a
lot like lettuce, bolting to seed during warmer months.
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Being from the brassica family watch for caterpillars and spray every
10-14 days with Bt (Bacillus Thuringienis var. Kurstaki). Don't
forget to reapply if it rains.
Harvest time
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Pak choy is ready to be picked as early as 6-8 weeks.
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Harvest the whole plant instead of leaf by leaf.
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Pak choy has well and truly lived up to our expectation of them filling
a gap in our cooking life (especially since our English spinach continues
to be an abysmal failure). When cooked the pak choy had an almost
sweet taste.
Last Updated
17 November, 2008
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