Radish

Radish
This is common radish 7 days after sowing inside under a lamp. You can eat this as salad and it's delicious and healthy. Let one plant grow big and harvest the seeds and you'll have enough for a whole year.
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Plantae
Order:	Brassicales
Family:	Brassicaceae
Genus:	Raphanus
Species:	R. sativus
Binomial name
Raphanus sativus

Radish is easy to grow. The seeds germinate in three to seven days and can be harvested in three to four weeks. When you sow radish every few weeks from February under glass to September outside, you'll have fresh radishes throughout the season.

When you sow deeper (4 cm) you get bigger radishes. You can however sow at a depth of less than 1 cm.

Till the soil to loosen it up. Don't give fresh manure but grow in a soil that is already fertile. Too much nitrogen makes the leaves grow but not the tubers, and too much organic matter attracts several kinds of worms and maggots that like to eat on your radishes.

Radishes are used in no-till farming to help reverse compaction.

Make sure that you keep the soil moist at all times. Radish doesn't like a dry soil. When you give them too much water after a period of drought, the tubers often crack open.

Radishes serve as companion plants for many other species. They function as a trap crop to attract several pests away from other crops.

When you let radish grow to blossom, each plant gets many small white flowers which attract many bees, which then can also pollinate other flowers in your garden.

Sowing and growing radish

Here you see the little holes made by the board with bumps about 2 cm apart. One radish seed in each hole. I cover them with lava gravel or fine soil.

Now here's a vegetable that's easy to grow! There are a few things to pay attention to. Make sure that the soil in which they grow never dries out. Don't use fresh manure or your little turnips will be eaten by any of those crawling devouring little creeps that hide in the soil and that you'll only discover after they bored holes through your radishes. I always grow radishes in a greenhouse. This is mainly because once or twice a day i go there to water the plants, so that assures me that i won't forget the radishes. They need water each day or else the roots will get dry and too hot to eat.

Here's how i do it. I have a board of 15 x 20 cm with bumps on it less than 1 inch apart. I push it into the soil and it makes a pattern of holes. I put one radish seed in each of them and cover that with soil or lava gravel. You can grow these radishes in a small back garden and when you let your kids do the sowing and watering, they'll love it and the radishes will taste even better.

Gallery

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  Radish seeds

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  Radish (Raphanus sativus) seeds - with cm-mm scale

See also

• Gardening courses
• Knowledge base:Gardening

External links

• How to make kimchi Recipe; note that kimchi is usually made from much larger white radish!
• Radish Research Topics
• Radish "The radish is an edible root vegetable of the Brassicaceae family that was domesticated in Europe, in pre-Roman times." - Wikipedia
• Radish green soup Recipe; yes, you can eat the greens too!