Shiso

Shiso is a commonly used herb in Japanese cuisine. It comes in green and red varieties. I’ve been growing red shiso specifically for my umeboshi experiments.

Using it

The leaves can be used fresh, cooked, or pickled. It’s used in a range of dishes from sushi to tempura. It tastes like a mix between basil, mint and clove. I find the red variety I’m growing has an earthy aroma similar to cumin.

The red variety is primarily used to dye foods such as umeboshi and pickled ginger.

Growing notes

I’m growing shiso in hydroponic basins, as with a lot of my plants, I start them at around 10cm away from the light until they grow close to the lights, and then move them down to around 25cm away from the light.

Shiso is probably the plant I’ve had the most trouble with, I’ve had very low germination rates. At one point, I had 30 seeds fail to germinate, after replacing them with fresh seeds, a couple germinated, but only one matured. I’ll update this page once I figure out how to more reliably germinate them.

Once they’ve germinated, they don’t seem to require any special care and grow quite quickly. They also propagate very easily with cuttings. Snip off a portion of the plant and put it straight into water. The new cuttings can be a bit dramatic, looking floppy after a few hours, but they will bounce back.