Asian greens are members of the brassica family and grow best in winter. Today we plant the Asian green pak choi, also known as bok choy, which is one of the fastest growing leafy greens. They’re ready in around 4 weeks.
Pak choi needs to be grown quickly to taste the best, so having a nutritious soil to plant them is very important. Like all brassicas, they like a pH in the soil of 6.5 to 7, so if your soil is at all acidic, add some handfuls of lime. It’s a good idea to add compost to the soil and we’ve also included chicken manure, as leafy greens appreciate the extra nitrogen found in animal manures.
As pak choi is so sweet, crisp and tender the slugs, snails and birds love feasting on it, more than any other vegetable. So really important to set yeast traps for the slugs and snails and net the beds to keep the birds out. Alternatively, you could view pak choi as a trap or host crop, which is one that attracts pests away from the other crops in your garden. Seems a bit of waste though, doesn’t it! One tip: Rob finds red pak choi, just like red kale, is less attractive to pests than green varieties.
One way to get a little more out of your plants is to cut the bulb about 2 cms above ground level. Then what happens is the plants sprouts baby pak chois – you’ll get about 5 little pak choi bulbs out of the mother plant which is a real bonus.
