Radish Growing Tips - easiest, fastest veggie to grow

Radish is a humble vegetable to grow, but did you know that it is one of the easiest and fastest veggie to grow, not to mention versatile in the kitchen.

How we grow radish

We use radish a couple of ways in our garden.

One is intercropping amongst slower growers, that way we maximise space. Radish is often the first thing to go into a freshly prepped garden bed, and often the first thing to be harvest with turn around time ranging from 4-8 weeks.

Certain varieties of radish also serve a purpose to fixing problems in our garden. That primarily being Daikon radish. The long tap root helps break up our clay soil and we chop and drop them to natural add organic matter deep into our no dig beds.

As they are so quick to grow, radish are also our go to if we need to fill space with something small. I don't like wasting space, but sometimes I don't want to wait 3 months for something to grow as seasons may be about to change. So it's a good in between crop to grow.

Check out the video below of our final harvest of radish we just harvested (we left them a bit late as we got covid so hadn't been eating them fast enough)

How we use radish in the kitchen

If you've ever bought radish from the store it's likely you've been disappointed. They don't store well so they are best picked fresh and eaten/cooked or preserved that day. When picked from the garden they are crisp and fresh.

We use radish as either a salad veggie, we roast it, chuck it in a curry or a stir fry, pickle it or lacto ferment (our favourite way to use it).

Tips for growing success

The number one key is sunshine. I find I can grow radish in pretty poor soil, as long as it receives full sun. If you do want to give things a little boost, a well prepped bed with plenty of aged compost and manure - we also give our root beds a top up with bone meal.

We plant our seeds quite densely (just like we do with carrots), making a small trench and liberally dropping seeds into the trench to backfill. We then go through and harvest a few times picking out the bigger ones first.

Problems you may run into

If you are intercropping, you may find towards the end of harvest you get an aphid issue as plants start to grow and create more shade. The odd caterpillar will have a nibble on the leaves, a snail might bite on the roots as they pop out of the soil level, but generally they are pretty resilient little veggies.

Radish should be quite fresh with a hint of peppery after taste. If you find your radish are bitter it means the water wasn't kept up to them. We find this in particular with daikon over the summer months so we now stick to growing over the cooler months.

Our favourite varieties to grow

There are a couple varieties we love to grow, Pink Beauty is hands down my favourite. Beautiful, fast growing and not as spicy as some varieties. For a fun salad we go with Watermelon radish. Or a good all rounder is the Cherry Belle. And the workhorse is the Daikon. You can find all our radish varieties that we've found to grow well here in the subtropics.

If you'd love inspiration on how to plan your garden come on over and join us inside the garden community dirt lovers.

 

Do you grow radish? I'd love to know what your favourite varieties are to grow and eat.