Hi folks! Here is a home for any and all discussion on growing out the 2025 radish mix as well as any other radishes you’re raising this year!
I’m in the midst of rebuilding the gardens here at my new home, getting a proper fence and irrigation system in place before planting the bulk of my vegetables. Here in the Central Virginia Blue Ridge we’ve had a few brief storms pass through over the last month, and many spring plants have put on noticeable growth. I’m looking forward to growing some big daikons for eating this spring, and hopefully getting a good seed harvest as well!
I’m sprouting some big daikon types from the '24 radish mix I overwintered in the back of my refrigerator, they should make a lot of seed later this spring! They’re really bushing out despite the hard freezing nights. I’ll add pictures if I can, but I was impressed with their size in my heavy clay soil, and interplanted with my winter rye.
How cold are those freezing nights you mention? Here in the Virginia Blue Ridge, my daikon radishes made it through most of the winter and then died when the temperature got down close to 10°F. We also have heavy clay, and they were planted among young rye grass.
The coldest nights since moving them back outside have been about 20°f, but thats after storring them all in the refrigerator over the winter. It got down to the -30’s this winter, no snow cover. The few radish i left as an experiment were dead come mid December. Wind chills in the -40’s at other times, even the cold hardy kale was dead dead.
But as they are right now they’re doing great with hard freezes that freeze the ground an inch down just fine. Good re-establishing rates too, only 1 has not started bushing out but may have just cut it back too far when storing.
Most of my diakons died, but I have two survivors. Min temperature about -20 F, but brief. A number of times went below 0. I had many more survivors before that last cold snap.
Your two daikons survived sub-zero temperatures?? Woah!
Are they just mulched or have you also used cold covers / other protection?
I’ve been looking around for evidence of freeze-hardy radishes lately; I think it’d be great to put together an overwintering radish mix for the seed share if the seeds could be sourced.
If your radishes put out seed this spring, would you be interested in growing out a portion of the seeds for a future seed share?
Do you have record or recollection of the coldest temperatures your radishes survived before their December demise? I wonder how cold hardy they are, despite succumbing to cold far below zero.
Here in the Blue Ridge, your radishes may have made it through our winter just fine!
Somwhere during the first or second week of December I harvested the best looking ones and the radishes I left out died not long after. I’m pretty sure I harvested before the 0° night as they were forcasting below freezing and worse for windchill.
Last winter our ground never even froze! It’s rare for us but I was really hoping for a second time, haha. But alas I was not so lucky, I do think they could have made it if we had a good snow. So I’m sure they could have made it down there.
Actually I didn’t protect them at all. No mulch. I wasn’t expecting that they would survive, although I hoped they would. I also didn’t expect temperatures that low! One parsnip and a half dozen rutabegas also survived.
If they seed, there should be more than enough to share.
Note that I planted a huge area and had only two survivors out of hundreds of plants. They would be easy to overlook if you weren’t specifically looking for them.
