Why Grow Red Giant Mustard? Bold & Colorful Red Giant Mustard is a striking mustard variety that combines beautiful red-tinted leaves with robust flavor and excellent garden performance. This slow-bolting variety extends the harvest season, allowing gardeners to enjoy tender greens over a longer period. Its attractive foliage adds vibrant color to both the garden and the dinner plate, making it as ornamental as it is productive. Spicy Flavor with Multiple Garden Uses Red Giant Mustard can be harvested young as a baby leaf to add a spicy kick and rich color to fresh salad mixes, or allowed to mature into large leaves with a fuller, peppery flavor that shines in cooked dishes. Beyond the kitchen, this versatile variety also makes an excellent cover crop for biofumigation, helping improve soil health and suppress certain soilborne pests and diseases when incorporated into the garden. Easy to grow and highly versatile, Red Giant Mustard is a great addition to any cool-season garden. Mustard Green Growing Tips • When to Plant Mustard Greens Mustard greens are considered a "cool season" vegetable that grow best in the fall and early spring months. This variety can be direct seeded or transplanted in the backyard garden. If transplanting, start seeds indoors or in a greenhouse 3-4 weeks before your intended in-ground planting date. Then space transplants 2-3" apart in your garden rows or beds. If direct seeding into your in-ground garden or containers, make a shallow (1" deep) planting furrow and lightly sprinkle seeds along the furrow. Then lightly cover the seeds and press to ensure good seed to soil contact. For small containers, you may wish to sprinkle mustard seeds over the entire container and lightly cover with more soil. Mustard greens can tolerate a light frost but will tend to become damaged during a heavy freeze. As a result, we recommend harvesting the leaves before a heavy freeze. The plants will often recover and grow back, but this will prevent the leaves you have from becoming damaged. Mustard will "bolt" or go to seed when temperatures begin to warm in the spring months. Planting in the late summer for a fall crop or in the late winter for a spring crop will provide the best results. • How to Fertilize Mustard Greens It's always a good idea to apply some pre-plant fertilizer to the soil prior to planting mustard seeds or transplants. We like to sprinkle Coop Gro organic fertilizer on our raised beds or along our rows prior to planting. This ensures the plants have the right nutrients to put down roots in their new soil. After each harvest, fertilize the plants with a balanced fertilizer to ensure quality repeat harvests going forward. We like to feed ours with a liquid solution of AgroThrive General Purpose or by sprinkling Coop Gro around the base of the plants and lightly mixing it into the soil. • When to Harvest Mustard Greens Mustard greens can be harvested whenever you'd like! Some gardeners like to harvest "baby mustard greens" as soon as the leaves are as big as their hands, while others prefer to wait until the leaves get larger. When harvesting mustard greens, you can pluck individual leaves off the plant or cut the plants a few inches above the soil line. Be sure to leave a few inches of the base of the stems in tact so the plants can continue to grow and produce another round of leaves.