Spice It Up! How to Harvest Homegrown Mustard Spice. Film #17 with Morag Gamble

Mustard seed is a surprisingly easy spice to grow at home. In this film I show you how to simply harvest mustard seeds - then make your own gourmet organic seeded mustard. (recipe link below)

Mustard is also great in curries, to spice up a vinaigrette, flavour soups and stews, crack in a mortar and pestle and sprinkle on a salad. There are so many uses!

Home made whole seeded mustard - for use in salads, dressings, soups, curries, stews. This particular mix has the mustard green seeds soaked in apple cider vinegar overnight, then blended with garlic chives, oregano, basil and turmeric. In other versions I make, I crush the seeds first.

A recipe for making seeded mustard from Mustard Green seeds can be found on my blog, Our Permaculture Life:
http://our-permaculture-life.blogspot.com.au/2016/11/simply-make-your-own-homegrown-mustard.html

The latin name for Mustard Spinach, or Mustard Greens, is Brassica juncea. The plant in this film is the Green Mustard Spinach. I also have Red Mustard Spinach and Frilly Mustard Greens.

I love it in the garden. It is so lush. It also adds lots of colour, both the leaves and the flowers, and the flowers are great attractors for bees.

Mustard Spinach flowers and immature seed pods

Mustard Spinach self seeds easily creating an abundance of food.  I let them grow where I want them, and harvest the others to eat raw in salads when they are about 15 cms tall.

Mustard spinach goes to seed quickly, but you can extend its life by harvesting the supple young shoots - they are edible like a spicy asparagus. When eventually you let some shoots mature, the flowers come and they are edible too. After that the seed pods form - the immature seedpods are edible and taste a bit like pea. Finally the seedpods mature and this is when you harvest the seeds like I demonstrate in this film.

Large edible leaves - great raw or cooked. Young supple shoot also very edible. Flowers too - buds and blooms.

Giant Red Mustard Spinach looks great and the taste is as powerful as horseradish.

Frilly Mustard Spinach has very unusual seed stalks - a curiousity in the garden.

Mustard Spinach seed pods add good organic matter back into the soil. Growing a crop of mustard greens also helps to get rid of root knot nematodes.