My horseradish is blooming. The flowers taste like broccoli. Has anyone here grown horseradish from seed?
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Here for the replies. Reliable bio mass. Maybe the root could be bred to be less intense. We grind up a quart jar and it lasts over a year as a condiment.
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No, but that’s really cool. I haven’t ever had blooms off of mine.
It can spread like wild fire, with seeds which are infertile, i wouldn’t want a fertile variety thanks. Just wait and see first. I grate it and put it in apple cider vinaigre, with some mayonnaise in a sauce for red meat it’s delish.
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I don’t know whether it’s fertile or not. It’s never bloomed before, but at my old house it was grown dry in sand and here it’s under the runoff of a roof and growing in clay.
If nothing else, I have an early spring green food.
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In that case, i noticed it’s easy to divide in autumn when i dig up roots. Small pieces of root form new growth. Bit like comfrey .
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I have a neighbor who has a horseradish patch, and she offered me some, but with a warning that it’s very invasive and a huge nuisance, and kale tastes much better anyway, so she doesn’t recommend growing it.
I’m inclined to trust her judgment on that. Given her evaluation, I don’t see any reason to bother with it, since I would rather have a perennial Brassica oleracea in any given space than mooooost other vegetables. 
But I don’t think I would pull out horseradish if it happened to volunteer. I’d probably let it stay, at least until I decided I needed to make space to squeeze in yet another perennial Brassica oleracea. 
If I had unlimited space, I would definitely stick it in somewhere. I just have to be selective because my growing space is limited. There are a lot of plants like that for me! 
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At my old house I planted horseradish in the dry garden–no supplemental water. It struggled, but spread slowly. I never had a problem leeping it under control.
On the other hand, the piece I planted in a pot and kept watered broke through the bottom of the pot and colonized the soil under it.
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Ha ha ha ha! So the secret is clearly to never water it.
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Ours is out along the driveway, not in the garden. It doesn’t get any care at all but grows well, we like it a lot and it is a nice-looking yard plant. It blooms quite a bit, but I’ve never seen a seed or a volunteer plant.
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Guess they’re a lot like garlic, it blooms but doesn’t have viable seeds, and seems in this case that’s a good thing. Nobody uses the root?
Interesting comparison, since this is also a root crop.
People use the root. That wasn’t the focus of this particular post.
Can confirm… give it a little (a lot?) too much shade, never water it, and let the harlequin beetles at it, and it pouts and is only mildly aggressive at spreading. Lol
That’s how I got mine, originally – a friend had a giant clump in one of those big round plastic tubs with rope handles… it was breaking the plastic and trying to escape! She was afraid to end up with a whole yard of horseradish, so she gave the whole thing to me. We harvested and used a bunch of the roots, and planted the rest. Now I’m pretty sure we’ll never be without horseradish, no matter how much I abuse it.
What do the roots taste like, anyway? All I really know about the flavor is that it’s very spicy, and I don’t like spicy food. Is it anything like radishes, where the flavor is pretty good, and the spiciness is pretty easy to get rid of by cooking it?
Ours is eye-meltingly spicy, which is how we like it. We don’t cook it, we grate it and add salt, vinegar, and lemon juice and fridge or freeze it. When we want to mild it down a little, we just use our grated horseradish mixed up into a creamy sauce. I’m not sure what it would be like cooked, but it does apparently cut the “heat.”
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People around here just tend to let it grow behind the garage/barn/shed etc.. needs no care whatsoever. It spreads slowly unless you actually dig it up and replant the crowns, which the old timers say should only be done in months that have an “r” in the name, so i need to dig some soon. It’s not a nuisance at all for us because our pigs and chickens eat the greens and having ground horseradish in the fridge at all times is just second nature to us. Pairs perfectly with any red meat. It’s not so much “spicy” on your tongue as it is in your nasal passages, eat a big spoonful and it will clear your sinuses in less than a minute.
Hee hee, “eye-meltingly spicy” is a such a great description! 
It’s awesome that it’s such an easy perennial if you like spiciness! Sounds like a great plant for a singe-my-taste-buds-off-please afficiando to have a patch of. (My dad’s like that . . . he thinks cayenne peppers are tasty to eat straight. 
)
wow! Really the flowers taste like Broccoli!?
Like Spicy Broccoli or the mild B. oleracea type Broccoli?
Do the greens also taste super Hot Spicy?
I wonder why Horseradish fails at making seeds, has it simply been transplanted so many times that it forgot how to? Sam Thayer notes the pods sometimes form but often fall off & don’t mature. So maybe he actually saw seeds form once? Idk, someone probably knows or has seen it.
Anyways here the horseradish Armoriacia rusticana Phylogenic Tree, part of the Cardamineae Tribe. I wonder if it could cross with Rorippa spp.
