🌍 Built for UK, USA, Canada & Worldwide Gardens Free Growing Guides for Every Region Love It or Your Money Back Secure Checkout Instant PDF Download Checked Against RHS, USDA & Agri-Food Canada Data Free Garden Layout Planner
🌍 Built for UK, USA, Canada & Worldwide Gardens Free Growing Guides for Every Region Love It or Your Money Back Secure Checkout Instant PDF Download Checked Against RHS, USDA & Agri-Food Canada Data Free Garden Layout Planner
Move through the SoilCommander growing library like a course: keep the navigation in place, open the next lesson, and build your garden plan step by step.
When to pick: Harvest young leaves, stems and flowers as a cut-and-come-again leafy vegetable before the plant bolts to flower in warm weather; sow in early spring and again in autumn for a longer cropping window (RHS; True Leaf Market).
Shungiku's leaves, stems and young flowers are harvested and eaten as a leafy vegetable in Japanese and Chinese cuisine, often called chop suey greens.
An erect annual/biennial with pinnately divided leaves and yellow daisy-like flower-heads in spring and summer, known by the culinary name shungiku or chrysanthemum greens. Not native to GB/Ireland. Hardiness H7 (hardy in severe European continental climates, below -20C). Full sun. Soil: chalk, clay, loam or sand, with a preference for well-drained sandy soil; moist but well-drained; acid, alkaline or neutral pH. Height 0.5-1m, spread 0.1-0.5m. Time to maturity 1-2 years. Propagated by seed sown in spring. Generally pest-free and generally disease-free. Leaves, stems and young flowers are eaten as a leafy vegetable (chop suey greens), especially in Japanese and Chinese cuisine.
1 independent sources are cited for this crop. Where they disagree - soil pH is the clearest case - every figure is preserved rather than averaged into false precision.
Frequently Asked Questions
What soil pH do shungikus need?
A pH of about 6–7.5. That span reflects genuine variation between the authorities we cite rather than a single agreed figure — the References section lists each source's exact range.
Plan next season before the problems start
This page gives you the thresholds; the planner turns them into your own calendar. It works from what you can observe and measure in your garden rather than from dates written for somebody else’s latitude.
Science-based growing guides · Thresholds that hold in any climate
This guide states the conditions the plant itself responds to — soil temperature, frost tolerance, day length — rather than dates, because the same calendar month means opposite seasons in the northern and southern hemispheres. Anything genuinely restricted to one part of the world is named as such rather than presented as universal. Written and maintained by our editorial team against international horticultural research and extension sources.
Sketch your exact plot shape, pick your crops, and get a spacing-accurate bed layout with companion pairings and a rotation plan. Spacing, companion pairings and rotation are the same in every climate and both hemispheres — pair the layout it gives you with when to plant to set your own timing from soil temperature.
