Checking out the price of bags of oriental greens at the supermarket is enough to make most gardeners want to grow their own.

You can pay pounds for bags of mixed greens which add flavour to tangy salads and quick stir-fries, but all too often you don’t use the whole bag in one sitting, so the rest is left hanging around in the fridge until it turns into an inedible green soggy mass.

It would be so much easier to pick the leaves you need straight from your garden, so there’s less waste and guaranteed freshness.

With this in mind, Which? Gardening, the Consumers’ Association magazine, tested 14 types of oriental veg to see how well they can grow either in your vegetable patch or in containers on the patio.

Researchers grew eight leafy vegetables in 30cm containers filled with peat-free compost. One pot of each was treated as a cut-and-come-again crop, while a second pot was left to produce larger plants. All were sown three times – in late March, late May and late July. Slower growing veg were grown in the ground.

Cut-and-come-again crops which were trialled included mizuna, mustard greens and amaranth, while other popular veg included pak choi, Chinese cabbage and giant radishes.

Among the easiest and quickest was mizuna, which can be added to salads and stir fries and is best grown on its own as it can outgrow and swamp most other salad plants. As a baby leaf it produced 300g per pot from a March sowing from the first cut and 185g from the second cut. Summer sowings proved less prolific and the young plants were damaged by flea beetles.

The tests found pak choi, which is delicious lightly steamed and served with garlic and oyster sauce, is easy to grow from seed although it’s slower than other oriental greens. The best results were seen from the early sowing but later batches were also successful so it’s worth planting throughout the summer, Chinese cabbage is best allowed to grow into a mature plant so it was grown in the ground. It was sown into small pots in mid-June and planted out in July – don’t sow any earlier or it will bolt – and forms a dense heart like an iceberg lettuce. You’ll need to cover it in fine netting to keep caterpillars at bay and it may be susceptible to mildew and mealy aphid, although the outer leaves can be thrown away. In the tests, when harvested, each head weighed just over 100g.

Mustard greens, which have a strong, peppery flavour, are also best used as a cut-and-come-again crop to perk up salads. The most successful sowing in the trial was the earliest sowing of the large-leaved ‘Red Giant’, as later sowings suffered from flea beetle damage. Other types worth trying are ‘Golden Streaks’ and ‘Green Frills’.

Among the most impressive-looking vegetables were mooli and beauty heart radishes. Mooli was sown in mid-July, thinned to 30cm apart and by late August they had produced massive white roots weighing up to 750g each. Beauty heart produced large round roots with brightly coloured centres, sown similarly to mooli. Researchers found that the quality was variable and concluded that this type of radish needs a long, warm summer.