About mustard, the condiment, I know nothing. I follow recipes.
I’ve now tried making two batches of mustard, from seed I harvested a little earlier this year. You can look at recent prior posts to see how I went about harvesting, threshing, and winnowing the mustard seeds.
Continue reading G23-048: Uncooked mustard. Handle with care.
I threshed the second half of my mustard crop today. This mustard was planted at the same time as the stuff I threshed last week, I just left to mature about a week longer. Continue reading Post G23-045: Somewhat less-green mustard.
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. Continue reading Post G23-044. Green mustard seed, explained.
I threshed and rough-cleaned my first batch of mustard today. Took about an hour. Yield was poor. Worse, the seeds look like last year — a mix of yellow mature seed and green/black immature seed.
Not clear what I’m going to do next, but I can endorse one method for threshing a stack of dried mustard plants reasonably efficiently: Comb them to break open the seed pods. Continue reading Post G23-043: Threshing mustard by combing it.
Source: NCSU state cooperative service.
This is an observation on the harlequin bug. Same size and shape as a stink bug, but gaudy. They are piercing-sucking insects, and they are a pest of brassicas. That category includes mustard.
I have them in my garden for the first time ever.
To cut to the chase: I believe the harlequin bug is attracted to the cut (but still living) stems of my mustard plants.
So if you cut your mustard while it’s still slightly green, or your mustard plants vary greatly in maturity at time of harvest, any still-living stubble from that cutting may attract the harlequin bug.
This is plausible. at least. These bugs are, in fact, sap-suckers. I’m just saying that it appears they were drawn by the smell of the raw cut green stem ends.
This is my one experience with these, so who knows. I present the evidence as follows:
So, grow it and cut it down dry? No H-bugs. Grow it again. Still no H-bugs. Cut it down green? Four days later, and I’m infested. But only where those green cut stems are.
Maybe that’s all coincidence. I think not.
I’m just getting it down in writing. I don’t see this being said elsewhere on the internet.
I’ve been having a hard time determining when and how to harvest mustard. Seems like mine goes from green, to shattered (broken, empty pods), with nothing in-between. If I follow typical internet garden advice and let it stand until its completely dry, I’m not going to have any seeds left.
To hedge my bets, I cut down about a third of my plot of mustard a few days back. It’s now drying in the sun. But from the looks of it, above, I may have been too early. That still looks awfully green.
The best description I found of what I’m supposed to be looking for, if I want to “swath” my mustard (cut it before it’s fully dry), is from North Dakota State University
Mustard should be swathed following general leaf drop when overall field color changes from green to yellow/brown and early enough to avoid shattering. To determine physiological maturity, select pods from the middle of the racemes of several plants in areas representing the average maturity of the field. Most varieties are at the optimum maturity for swathing when upper pods have turned and seeds are brown or yellow. The remaining 25% of green seeds will mature in the swath prior to harvest.
Much of that makes sense. Look for leaf drop. Got it. Look for the field turning from green to gold. Fine. Now check a bunch of pods that represent the median of what’s in your field. That is, seed pods in the middle of the stem, on plants of average maturity.
Then I lost it. I could not make head or tail out of this phrase:
” … when upper pods have turned and seeds are brown or yellow.”
But, on mine, the pods at the bottom turn brown first. Which makes sense, because those would be the first to flower. If I wait for all the upper pods to turn (from green to gold), I won’t have any seeds left. And since this description was written for the types of mustard that shatter easily, I know that’s not what it’s telling me to do.
After about my twentieth re-reading, I finally got it.
Not “upper pods” meaning the ones at the top of the plant. “Upper pods”, meaning, for the test pods, the end of the pod that attaches to the plant. That end of the median pod should be golden. It’s OK if the rest of the pod is green, as long as the seeds are fully-formed, and most (75%) are brown.
Re-written: Harvest when the median pod, on the median plant, is starting to turn golden, at the stem end of the seed pod. And when, after splitting the seed pod, most of the seeds in the pod are golden. At that stage, as long as the rest of the seeds in the pod are fully formed, they’ll turn from green to golden as the plant cures.
Below I have a seed pod that’s almost right. The upper pod — the part attached to the stem — is brown. The tip is still green. And, while you can’t see it, the first couple of seeds in the pod were, in fact, yellow. And all the seeds are fully-formed, that is, full size. That should mean that all the green seeds shown here would have gone on to ripen to gold, if I’d cut that plant down at this stage.
That’s still a bit too young, from the criteria above. I ought to see yellow seeds down most of the pod. But even at this stage, the pod was already starting to shatter (separate). So it’s possible that I have to harvest at this relatively green state, and hope for the best.
I think this all fits now.
If you have a mustard that doesn’t shatter, you can just wait until the whole field turns brown, and harvest it.
If you have one that shatters — where the seed pods split once they turn brown, and mine has been doing — you can’t wait that long.
Instead, you’re going to have to harvest it partly green. That inevitably means harvesting seed pods that are in a wide range of maturities.
Determining what “partly” means is the tricky part. So you pick the point at which the median seed pod in your field is just ripe enough that it will continue to ripen after you cut it. That means that the top (stem end) of that pod is brown, and most (but not all) the seeds in those median pods have already turned brown.
I harvested about a third of my mustard plants today. The stack of plants is currently on a bed sheet, on my back porch, drying.
Not sure if this was smart, but it looks like heavy rains for the next two days, and I figured I’d roll the dice on part of the crop. I may have been a bit early. Continue reading G23-036: Mus-stakes?
Ever get partway through a task and thought, hmm, maybe this wasn’t such a great idea?
Such was today’s task, making mustard shocks. That is, bundling mustard stems together so that the mustard plants would stand upright to dry, rather than lying on the ground. Continue reading G23-030: Shocking mustard. Maybe not the best idea I’ve ever had.
This post is a note to myself about what I plan to do with the mustard in my back yard. Continue reading G23-029: Notes to myself on mustard harvest, curing, threshing, etc., etc.
Edit 2/24/2024: At the end of the day, the big fact, that nobody bothers to say, that I didn’t realize, is that you have to harvest your mustard in the cool of autumn. I guess I should have taken a hint from the fact that North American Mustard Belt is in Canada. Restated, you can’t harvest mustard, in the summer, in Virginia. By that I mean you can’t get flavorful, evenly-cured, pleasantly-edible, good-looking mustard seed from mustard planted as a spring cover crop, in Virginia. Which is a pity, as mustard makes a dandy cover crop here.
Whether or not I can plant mustard mid-summer, and get a decent crop of pleasantly-edible seed in the fall, in Zone 7 Virginia, I will find out this year.
Original post follows.
This is another one of those notes-to-myself posts. I’m just getting a bunch of facts that I need in one place, so I can’t lose track of them. In this case, the facts are about growing and harvesting yellow mustard in the home garden.
I only make two points in this posting.
First, I ought to expect to get about quart of mustard seeds from every 100 square feet of planted area.
Second, I should harvest yellow mustard well before the “dry and crispy” stage shown in most internet videos on this topic. Professional farmers either harvest it when the field is a mix of green-and-gold, seeds are all fully-formed but up to 25% remain green (for “swathing”, or cutting it to let it dry in the field). Or they can wait until all seeds are yellow and the moisture content is no lower than 12%.
Edit 3/8/2024: A good part of the reason you can’t harvest mustard, in Virginia, in the summer, is that the green mustard seed will NOT finish ripening in the Virginia summer heat. The heat destroys the enzymes in the plants required to finish maturing the remaining green seeds to gold. As a result, what is described as a standard technique for actual (Northern, fall harvest) mustard farmers (swathing) does not work at all in the middle of a Virginia summer.
Search this website for other posts on growing, threshing, winnowing and using home-grown mustard seed.
FWIW, this advice applies only to yellow mustard, not to other varieties.
Continue reading G23-027: Some further notes on growing yellow mustard in the home garden.
