I haven’t, but I remember reading a post on permies or similar of a grower who would uproot and taste radish and then replant it for seed. This is internet hearsay from memory so your mileage may vary. IIRC he would only take a bite to test flavor. He also chopped off the greens. Said the plants would often bolt right after.
I haven’t had any luck in doing that with radish. Not a problem for me though because I consider the leaves and pods of radish to be the usable parts, not the roots. Flavor selection is easy for that, if one shows up that I don’t like I just cull it before seeds mature. Of course, it’s pollen has already been released into the overall population by then but only those I like best are allowed to mature seed. Over the years they have moved toward what we like best without completely eliminating the other diversity.
2 Likes
I’d love to see how you use radish leaves and pods.
I was going to ask the same question of turnips, but if radishes don’t let you try a bite before letting them go to seed I imagine that turnips don’t either :(. I wonder if there’s a way to slice off a piece and then wax the cut or something like that to protect it from rot
1 Like
You can do about whatever you want with radish leaves, put them raw in salads or on sandwiches or you can cook them. The tender stems and flower buds are good too. The leaves of a lot of them, most in fact, are a bit fuzzy and kind of off-putting raw but mixed in a salad or something it’s not so bad. I like them stirred up in scrambled eggs and really like them in a lot of different soups in different amounts. The seed pods are my favorite part, I just eat them raw or in salad, pretty much the same as you would eat the root and they taste about the same. I don’t really like them better than the root, it’s just that you can harvest lots of pods for a long time from a plant, but you just get one comparatively small harvest from the root, so I see it as a more economical use of space. Turnip greens and seed pods are also good. With both, after a bit as they mature, they get tough and stringy, but you can harvest for two or three weeks from the same plant. *I let a branch or two of the very first ones go on to mature for seed.
I haven’t really tried much to test roots for flavor and replant. From the little I have done; I know it isn’t as easy as with carrots. I suspect if you put your mind to it and experimented some, you’d figure it out. Or maybe someone else already knows and will chime in.
2 Likes
Sorry I have been away, catching up now. Ok well just reading this now, I have an idea - how about putting propolis on the ‘wound’? That’s what I do with my skin, maybe it would work with radishes too! (?) I get raw propolis and put it in 96% pure alcohol (special Russian vodka!) and leave it until I have a saturated solution. I have never bought commercial propolis tincture but I’m guessing mine might be many times stronger! With almost no water in it, the alcohol evaporates within seconds of application, leaving a nice layer of propolis as a protective layer over the skin, physically protective in that way, as well of course as being anti-viral, anti-fungal, and anti-bacterial. I wonder if this could help preserve the radishes after being cut also.
I managed to get hold of some ‘giant radish pods’ seeds. I am exuberantly looking forward to my first taste of radish pods!!! You are growing common radishes with the small round roots, or, a specific variety developed for the pods such as rat tail radish? So far as I understand, the latter have a lot more to offer for pods and negligible roots.
Oh, I have only just noticed - the common radishes are Raphanus sativus (or it seems sometimes called Raphanus raphanistrum subsp. sativus?) whereas the seed pod ones like rat tail radish, are a different species, Raphanus caudatus. Interesting…
1 Like
Here’s a photo of “Rat-tail Radish” from a UK seed shop:
And here’s another variety of the same species, from a friend of mine in Poland:
Quite a contrast to regular radish pods, though I would love to try eating those too 
:
5 Likes
If subsequent failure to thrive following the uprooting and damage is largely or primarily influenced by contamination at the damage site, this seems likely to help. I think it is a great idea worth a shot!
2 Likes
I’ve never bothered with getting any of the rat-tail types, don’t really know why. Mine are just a mix up of lots of kinds and the pods are generally on the smallish side but there are lots of them. I don’t mind that they also make roots, we do eat them too mostly when a bunch come up in a crowded clump and need thinned. Also if one comes up at the proper time in late summer, they can make very large roots going into fall and early winter and those roots are very good.
Last fall I planted the first new kind I’ve planted for a long time. It was a daikon type from Baker Creek. Its leaves lack that annoying fuzz and were really good, the seemed a bit thicker too and added a different texture to salads.
I saved most of that pack to plant this spring for seed. I’m going to intermix them with some of mine and make sure to save seed from them specifically. I may try to move my whole radish landrace to this non fuzzy phenotype.
@MarkReed by coincidence, this happened in my living room!
So, the slugs ate all the leaves of my vegetables outside, well all but one or two, so I look a couple of the sad looking radishes indoors and planted them with my ‘Christmas tree’ (tomato plant direct seeded outside but was so shaded I took it inside, gave its first red tomatoes in November and has been giving me some each month since, had one so far this month ). Well the radish was about as big as my little finger, smaller in fact. (Bear in mind these should grow to the size of my forearm!) Anyway maybe the time I left my lights on overnight or somehow anyway, seems I triggered it into flowering! Pity only one out of two was triggered because I heard they’re self incompatible. Anyway I tried to use its own pollen to pollinate it, just on the offchance it would work. So far 2 radish pods have seeds! Well, one with 1 and one with 2. I ate the one with 1 today, it was so delicious! Quite hot!
Still more flowers coming so, maybe some more to eat soon…
And that other species I mentioned and gave photos for above? Well what I may not have mentioned is that I was too impatient to wait for spring to plant mine because I so wanted to taste it. So I did plant 3 seeds of each, of both those 2 varieties Raphanus caudatus. I wet the seeds first on 24th January. Don’t remember how long they took to germinate, but, look now! They got big:
And on one of the two varieties, oh what’s that?
Somehow I triggered that one to flower too
I didn’t mean for them to be so quick, but I’m not complaining! Luckily all 3 have started making flowers so should be crunching soon 
1 Like
Thank you for sharing this.
I had no idea Rat Tail radish was a different species! How fascinating! I’m planning to grow it this year. I enjoyed the seed pods of the French Breakfast radish I grew last year, so I figured bigger seed pods would be even better.
So that means the Rat Tail radish may be a separate landrace entirely from my other radishes?
I do see it sometimes referred to as a variation of the main cultivated radish species, though. And prickly lettuce was originally classified as a separate species from domesticated lettuce, even though they cross freely, and taxonomists eventually decided to consider them the same species. So, the relevant question is: Do we know how much crossing happens between those two radish species?
1 Like
Yeah I’ve seen both. I wonder, perhaps the human conceptual box of ‘species’ is not so applicable to reality, since the definition I was anyway taught at school was that an individual is a different species if it cannot produce fertile offspring with the ‘other’, but we find that some varieties within one tomato species can’t cross with others in the same species (in some of the self incompatible species between populations in different areas, so far as I understand if my memory serves me correctly); and some tomato species easily interbreed with each other (e.g. esculantum, galapagense, cheesmaniae, and pimpinelifolium all easily cross with each other), so…
Anyway, the rat tail radishes seem functionally different, and that seems of practical significance for us who eat them. It seems they do interbreed but as for landraces, we might not want to cross them since we either want good sized roots to eat, or good sized pods, and perhaps that is a matter of energy put one place or the other. However, I wonder, perhaps if you want a small root like the ones popular in the West, but big pods also, then perhaps crossing an Asian root radish (big) with a rat tail radish, might end up producing Western-sized roots and rat tail (which I think is from Asia also) sized pods!
But I would think perhaps it would be good to make a landrace of root radishes (I prefer the big Asian ones!) and a separate rat tail landrace. The really big rat tail pods I mentioned above would seem a very good candidate to include in the latter!
I did cross the 2 rat tail varieties I have here (and rat tail with root radish which I did out of curiosity just since they were flowering together), but I got a spider mite infestation at the same time as I got ill, and my radishes did not survive, so, no crosses gave seed unfortunately! At least most of my tomatoes survived, though Iost some of my early ones.
I wonder if crossing a leaf radish variety with a Rat Tail radish would get me nice pod-focused radish landrace going? I like the roots just fine, but I like the leaves better, and the pods best of all. So I don’t care if I get huge roots – I want leaves and pods! 
Worth a try! The rat tail ones I have, have leaves and stems that are a bit spiky. I don’t know if all rat tail radishes are like that (anyone know?) but I guess crossing them all up and then selecting for:
- big smooth leaves
- large and plentiful pods
- adaptation to local conditions
… should be a nice plan!
“A bit spiky”! Are they rough, like sandpaper? Do they have actual soft thorns, like zucchinis? I wouldn’t have expected either on a radish. 
If you click on my picture of them above, it will enlarge the photo and you should see on the left pot what I mean if you zoom in. It’s enough to be unpleasant to brush against. No idea if they soften fine if steamed but I would way rather smooth leaves for eating.
1 Like
Oh, yeah, those little hairs do look like they could be stiff enough to be soft prickles. That’s a shame!
I wonder if there’s trichome-free trait available in some individuals of the species. There is with pepo squashes – that’s how I’m planning to breed thornlessness into the population. If there is with Rat Tail radishes too, maybe collecting germplasm from a bunch of different sources may turn up some that are trichome-free, or at least have smaller and softer ones that are less troublesome.
Yeah mine are dead now (I did get some seed out of them before they died, luckily) but from what I remember of the more usual rat tail variety I had ,out of 3, at least 1 was not spiky.
Nice! So if I plant enough, I can probably select them in the direction I prefer.
1 Like
I should think so. I cannot attest to eating the leaves though. But presumably if you cross both species then you should get a mix anyway and select from there right?