Howdy folks! It’s the radish thread, here for your radish reports! What are your radishes looking like? What about the radish crop this year has got you excited or intrigued?
It’s mid-May, and a cool front has brought rain all across the Virginia Blue Ridge. I’m happy, soaking it up and smiling alongside all the plants. This year I’ll be planting daikon in the fall as a cover crop. It’s a continuation of the soil building program here on the land I’m tending, to help re-establish fertility and a carboniferous layer in mountainside that was scraped clean of all soil goodness. The work continues; thankful for the plants, microbes, soil animals and fungi that are doing all of the heavy lifting!
The plan this year is to broadcast seed among the weeds in August or September (whenever we get a good rain front that lasts a few days); then I will let them grow and aerate the soil until the winter kills them, and they’ll rot and add to the soil layer. Since their primary purpose is to work the soil, I won’t be harvesting them all. I might grab a few for a meal here and there, but otherwise will leave them be.
After the winter kills them, I typically let the field stand as it is over winter. All of the dead weeds provide homes for insect life to overwinter, and then in the spring if I am going to grow vegetables I will cut the weeds, old dead and new living, and use them as mulch to cover the seeds I sow. That way the bugs have all they need to live through the year, and the full diversity of life will be present to strike a balance in the garden.
I planted radish May 19th, as a nurse crop for my direct seeded tomatoes. I did the same last year, and produced a crop of seed.
My irrigation water became active that day. It was a dry spring, so I didn’t try to plant earlier. My last spring frost occurred a few days after planting.
Still sorting this out with daikon in particular. I’ve yet to have a good seed harvest when spring planting radishes due to a number of factors. Hopefully as the soil builds, I will start to get more vibrant growth. I unfortunately am starting with bare red clay subsoil, so there’s a lot of time and work to be done to get the fertility back to a decent level.
Planted radishes (Black Spanish) for the first time last spring in 2025, they went to flower pretty quickly, then i dried out all the seed pods and replanted them in the fall along with some daikon radish as well. Those overwintered and i am letting them flower this year into a crazy radish jungle that i have to bend and maneuver to get around. I will then collect all of those seeds and mix them with the 2026 GTS radish seeds to replant this fall for an overwinter cover crop. I have yet to actually harvest any roots (or taste any seed pods for that matter) as ive mainly been focusing on building up my soil as well as hopefully adapting the turnips to make decent sized roots for eating, since they are growing in heavy clay and havent produced anything substantial yet.
I wonder what would happen if you adapted your radish seed to your difficult soil. Lots of members here work under challenging soil conditions and the general idea of adaptation is to change the crop to fit your conditions instead of changing your conditions to fit your crop.
I planted summer radishes and radishes for edible pods 10 days ago. A bit later than I would have preferred so I expect them to bolt early, but should be good enough to do some selection for overall health and for pods especially for taste (my highest priority is succulence and lack of fibres - might try to do the selection after drying them and see which ones turn most easily into dust)
Successful overwintering radishes?!? I’d love some of that seed! That’s been a hurdle for me here in the mountains, where the lows can get into the single digits or low teens for a week or two each winter. What are the lowest temperatures in your garden during the winter?
I hope to find out some day! Gardening in communally managed land as I do, some things are beyond my control, which makes growing things especially difficult. One of these is free range chickens, which enjoy all of the free food I broadcast out for them. It is part art part science to be crafty enough to get the seed bedded down and hidden in the right place and time to get plants. Then getting them to maturity is part luck, part knowledge and technique. So much to learn, and I’m just getting started. What kinds of predators partake in your garden? For me it’s the chickens, for others I know songbirds can serve a similar function.
You’re breeding radishes with seed pods that dry into dust? I’m intrigued; of the small amount of seed I was able to harvest last year, I noticed part of the challenge of seed saving is efficiently threshing. There’s always some amount of pods that don’t break open. I’d be curious what the difference in seed yield might be between fibrous seedpods and non-fibrous seedpods during the threshing process.
Where I grow radishes, deer and hares also live in large numbers. I need to fence in beets and perennial kales for that reason. Radish and other Brassicaceae seem to make it during the summer when there is so much else to eat for them.