Ready for radishes
Posted on May 18th, 2009 – 9:56 AMBy Jaime Chismar
Last year’s radish
No doubt about it. Gardening expands your aesthetic and gastronomic tastes.
Before I bought a pair of gardening gloves, radishes were an obstacle between me and a perfectly good salad. Now, every spring, radishes are the salad. French Breakfast radish are my favorites. I look forward to their snappy flavor on my morning plate of toast and scrambled eggs.
These tasty treats are also visually stunning. I love how their bright red skin fades into a crisp clean white.
This year’s crop is almost ready. I can hardly wait to pull these beauties out of the dirt.
As you’ve learned to garden, what veggies have you learned to love?
18 Responses to "Ready for radishes"
I have learned to make things with Rhubarb…cake, jam, etc. It is the only thing I can count on to come up year after year in my garden! 
[…] Greengirls – […]
I love radishes too… in my CSA box last week we got giant (baseball-sized) BLACK radishes. The drama between the black skin and white inside made them almost too beautiful to eat!
Also, having an abundance of cucumbers two years ago gave me a real taste for cucumber water, so refreshing on a hot day.
When do you plant your radishes to get them up and out so early?
Idris — I planted my radishes on April 15. They like it a little cool. The photo above is last year’s radish. This year’s crop still has a week to go.
I have yet to love eggplant. I keep trying! Beets are my true garden love.
Hey Christagirl!
I totally agree. Though it is certainly pretty, eggplant and I may never be friends.
“I have learned to make things with Rhubarb…cake, jam, etc. It is the only thing I can count on to come up year after year in my garden!”
My wife used to make a rhubarb topping for pancakes that was fantastic. Sadly we did not transplant any rhubarb when we moved - and don’t have a veggie garden at the moment.
Radishes, definitely. I still hate tomatoes but love to grow them. Cucumbers and beans, maybe, but I doubt we’ll ever be BFFs.
I can only tolerate eggplant in babaganush. If you add enough garlic to things I think you can choke down anything.
Radishes are also good in a sandwich of butter and rye bread. It sounds wierd but the English tea has either cucumber or radish sandwiches.
I think I’d only grow eggplant because they make such a gorgeous centerpiece. My mom grew them and when she’d make us kids weed the garden, we’d pinch off the flowers so there wouldn’t be as many (we all hated it).
thanks everyone for the great Plant Swap!
DebW - That sandwich sounds fantastic. I love Rye bread.
Jaymi - I had a similar experience with tomatoes. They are so beautiful, but we just don’t eat a ton in our house. I end up giving most of mine away.
So how do you know when your radishes are ready to be harvested? I currently have radishes, carrots, peas, lettuce, mesclun, garlic, onions, shallots growing and this is my first time for a lot of them. I planted my first crop of cherry belle and champion radishes about 3 weeks ago. Maturity dates are given in days, is that usually days from germination or days from planting? I’m assuming from germination is the one to use. HELP! 
Julia,
We both have to wait at least 3 weeks from germination. 3 weeks is a best guess under ideal conditions. If it’s a cool spring, it may be 4 or possibly 5 weeks.
When a radish is ready, you’ll often see the red hips peaking above the surface. I’ll scrape a little dirt away with my fingers to gauge the thickness of the root.
Make sure you thin your root veggies. If the seeds are too close together, you’ll grow a great head of greens but no roots!
i adore sugar snap peas, so much so that i eat them right off the vine every day. each year i keep planting more, thinking i’ll get enough to make a meal with, but so far i just keep eating them all off the vine.
i also love the crunch of kohlrabi.
I love that there is a forum topic on radishes! I’m a new gardener and I kept reading that radishes were THE easiest thing to grow - I also read on my seed packet that they would be ready in 3 weeks. First of all, I couldn’t tell the difference between a radish seedling and a weed!! Finally when I discovered that radishes have heart-shaped leaves, I left what I thought were radish seedlings in the ground. Then when I went to harvest them, there was nothing on the end of them!! I assumed I had mistaken them for weeds again. But now I just think I picked them way too early. I have a row that are growing strong. I think I’ll wait to harvest them until I see them peaking out of the ground.
I looked yesterday and a few of the plants have the red hips you described. So does that mean I should be picking those? I did thin them out, I actually just thinned out my 2nd planting of them done a little over a week ago. I will be planting more this weekend too. Wanted to have a staggered harvest.
I pulled one up yesterday. It wasn’t super big but boy was it DELISH! I will wait another week for them to get bigger as I think I jumped too quick to pick that one. I just had to see what it was doing though!
Greengirls Connie Nelson, Robyn Dochterman and Jaime Chismar are dishin' the dirt from the backyard garden and beyond. Whether you're a greenthumb or greenhorn, they're eager to learn from your misshaps, mistakes -- and most importantly, your sweet successes -- all growing season long.
Need more Greengirls? Follow along on Twitter:
Subscribe to Greengirls
Learn more about RSS
Garden resources
Categories
- Apples, Plums + Tree fruits (18)
- Asparagus (3)
- Beans + Peas (9)
- Bees (12)
- Beets, Carrots + Root veggies (7)
- Berries (10)
- Books + Resources (13)
- Chickens (13)
- Compost (7)
- Container gardening (7)
- Corn (2)
- Critters + vermin (27)
- Cucumbers + Melons (15)
- Farmer's Markets (1)
- Flowers + Grasses (27)
- Garlic (5)
- Greens + Lettuces (10)
- Herbs (6)
- Lawn care (12)
- Mulch (7)
- Mystery plants (9)
- Potatoes (9)
- Preserving (7)
- Rain gardens (2)
- Seed starting (16)
- Soil care (4)
- Squashes + gourds (1)
- Succulents (2)
- Tomatoes, Peppers + Eggplant (38)
- Tools, gloves, rain barrels + more (17)
- Transplanting (1)
- Tree + shrub care (4)
- Uncategorized (164)
- Water gardens (3)
- Weather woes (25)
- Weeds (13)
- Weekend to-dos (11)
