Plant · P-189

Ethiopian Mustard

Brassica carinata

Ethiopian mustard is a fast, leafy brassica with a mild, pleasant cabbage flavor - milder than most mustards - eaten as greens, with immature flower stems cooked like broccoli. It's also an unusually good soil-building crop: its root system is larger and more extensive than most brassicas, and it's one of the few in its family that actually prefers alkaline soil, so it can go straight into unamended alkaline clay where other mustards need an amended bed. It tolerates frost down to the mid-20s Fahrenheit without losing yield, but a hard freeze in the low 20s can kill it, so where winters dip that low it's best grown as an autumn leaf and green-manure crop rather than carried through to seed outdoors. Pressed seed meal makes a high-protein livestock feed, but the standing plant shouldn't be grazed.