Bottom line: Why is a lot of my mustard seed green? Answer: It’s too hot. It’s too hot in Virginia, in July, to harvest a proper crop of yellow mustard seed.
What’s the problem, exactly? I was following what I thought where the right directions for harvesting it partly green. (It shatters — the seed pods split — if I let it go brown.)
The enzymes needed to convert chlorophyll to other compounds post-harvest don’t function in the heat or when the plant has dried. That, from Saskatchewan Mustard Development Commission’s Mustard Production Manual, forwarded to me by my wife.
Bottom line, restated: Pretty sure there’s no easy or obvious way to harvest nice yellow mustard seed in Virginia in July. Possibly — just speculating here — this is why the North American mustard belt is mostly in Canada.
Second bottom line: I can’t separate out the green ones. I tried sieving the mix through fine screen, but as far as I can tell, the green, brown, and yellow seeds are identical except for color. So they’re not just green seeds, they are full-sized seeds that are green.
On the plus side, from the same reference above, it appears that’s all edible. Green is OK.
So, rather than admit that this doesn’t work, I am renaming the resulting condiment as Virginia Summer Mustard. It has the green of summer in every bite. The idea being that I have no choice but to grind up the mix of seed colors shown above. Gonna affect the color, for sure. The flavor, maybe not.
No, seriously, that’s the plan. Thresh the rest of the crop, as described earlier, using a comb. Clean all the seed, to the point shown above. Winnow to remove the last little bits of non-seed organic trash.
Then grind up some of that mix and see how it tastes. I hear it takes fresh mustard some time to lose its heat, so it may be a few weeks before I report back any results. If it looks dreadful, I guess I can do what commercial mustard producers do, and add turmeric to ensure that the final mustard looks yellow.
New, in my experience
The bottom line is that this is outside of my gardening experience. That is, a food crop that will grow just fine, but ripen incorrectly if planted at the wrong time. For everything else I grow, either the plant determine when it will produce ripe fruit (cane fruits, figs), or, when the plant produces something ripe, it’s edible.
Certainly, you have to time some plants based on the weather. Some things like it cool, like peas and potatoes. Some things like it hot, like okra. Some will bolt (go to seed) if it gets too hot, like lettuce.
If you’ve planted those at the wrong time, you can tell from the look of the plant.
But I’ve never grown a food crop that looks spectacular, right up to the time you’re supposed to harvest it. If the mustard plants had been diseased or sickly, that would have been one thing. Instead, I had healthy, thriving plants that yielded off-colored, possibly-unusable seed.
I’ve re-sown one small plot with the same mustard seed. That should mature in mid-October. If I can’t get mature yellow seed at that point, then in my garden, mustard goes back to being strictly a ground cover, not a food plant.
