Plant · P-192

Chinese Cabbage

Brassica rapa subsp pekinensis

Chinese cabbage (napa) forms a dense, crisp, mild-sweet head best eaten raw in salads, but the plant is really governed by day length and heat rather than cold - it bolts to flower once temperatures push past about 80 F, so growing it well means timing it around summer, not winter. Because of that, an autumn planting produces heads while a spring planting almost always bolts before it heads up, though that isn't wasted: the flowering shoots it sends up are sweet and tender and cook just like broccoli raab. It's a heavy feeder that needs constant moisture and rich soil, since with this crop how fast it grows is close to the same thing as how good it tastes. It shares its rotation constraints with a long list of related brassicas, so once clubroot shows up in a bed, the whole cabbage-turnip-mustard family needs to stay off that ground, not just this one crop.