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Simply Make Your Own Homegrown Mustard

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Making homegrown seedy mustard is incredibly easy and satisfying. It tastes absolutely amazing, too.

Each batch is different and we love to experiment with a range of flavours from the garden.

Mustard adds so much wonderful flavour to so many meals – salads, soups, sandwiches, curries, stirfies, dips..

It’s time we made some more. We just harvested over a kilogram of seed from a few Mustard Spinach (Brassica juncea) plants. Some of it I will use in curries, some in salad dressings, some will be planted, and a lot shared with friends and others we meet in our little origami seed packets.

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Green Mustard Spinach Seed
Even so, after all the things I plan to do with it, there’ll still be a lot left, and there’s more to harvest tomorrow before it scatters itself completely back into the soil.

Making mustard will be one of tomorrow’s homeschool activities – a science experiment.

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 Stockpiling my seed for making mustard.

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup Mustard seeds
  • 1 cup Vinegar (we are using raw organic apple cider vinegar)
  • salt, pepper, herbs and spices to taste – rosemary, oregano, chives, garlic, thyme, basil, mint, sage, tarragon, ginger, turmeric chilli…
  • other optional extras – lime/lemon juice and/or zest, honey

Method:

  • Soak mustard seeds in vinegar overnight
  • Blend
  • Add herbs
  • Transfer to jars and refrigerate

I’ll post soon to show you how we go….

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The seed is ready to harvest – and already self-seeding from some pods.

A Self-Seeding Favourite

I like Mustard Spinach self-seeding because I know I am guaranteed to have mustard spinach – both red and green – coming back year after year. I can be sure to have lots of leafy greens throughout the cool weather without even trying.

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Red Mustard Spinach

Healthy Food

Mustard Greens one of the most nutritious green-leafy vegetables available around. Their spicy crisp leaves are high in many vitamins and minerals. It rates up there above kale as a ‘supergreen’. 

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All parts of the plant are edible, even the flowers (spicy and colourful in a salad) and the young seedpods (pea-like in flavour).

The Abundance of Mustard Greens

I so appreciate the abundance of Mustard Greens. I use everything – the young leaves, the old leaves, the young flower stalk, the flowers, the young seed pods, the seeds. It feeds us, our animals and our soil. It’s big leaves often get chopped and dropped – there’s just too many to eat.  The seedpods and dry stalks go back to the soil too.

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A Spicy Deterrent

It’s spicy leaves are a deterrent to pests and I hide more delicate things around it.

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