I'm Ron Patterson with Utah State University Extension in Carbon County.
Today we're going to plant radishes.
Radishes are a great vegetable, especially for beginning gardeners, they're easy to get
started, and they do well, they start early in the spring, they're hardy to the frost.
So even if you get them planted a little bit early and it's a little bit cold, they will
tolerate that very well.
Another nice thing about radishes is that over the season - they've got a short growing
season - so you can plant them and you'll have...you'll have radishes in four to five
weeks.
Then you can plant some more a week or two later and so you can kind of do succession
planting like that and have radishes throughout the season.
Thing about radishes is when it gets hot in our high desert country here in Utah, about
July - mid-July through August - the radishes don't do well.
They'll go to seed, the roots will get kind of woody, so you want to have your radishes
done by then.
You can also plant radishes in the fall and have a good crop.
So if you planted them about mid-August, you would have a good radish crop in the fall
and I've actually found that I have fewer problems planting them that way as far with
some of the insect problems that I have earlier in the spring.
All right, it's very simple: to make a furrow, just use your hoe - the corner of your hoe,
like that, make yourself a furrow.
Try to keep your rows straight or the farmer's - neighbor farmers - will be upset at you.
A spring planting in our high desert country of Utah typically will require us to put some
extra water down before we get our seed planted.
This year especially has been a dry winter and spring, so the soil's very dry.
It's important for us to get some...water into our furrows.
Now radish seeds are quite hardy; they'll pop up through just about anything you want
to plant them in, so I don't have to worry so much about whether or not the soil's going
to crust over.
But it's always a good idea if you can get enough water down there to get the seeds to
germinate and pop up before you have to water again.
Radish seeds should pop up within about seven to ten days and 28 to 35 days later you should
have radishes ready to eat.
Nice thing about those is that you can get a quick result early in the season, feel
good about your gardening, have nice fresh radishes from your garden in your salad.
Or just eat them with a little bit of salt on them, or however you like to eat your radishes.
Okay, so we've got our water soaked down.
Radishes are a single seed - they don't come up in clusters - but it's always kind of amazing
how thickly they seem to pop up once you get them planted.
Just kinda scatter those down your row...they're in the bottom of the row there...cover them
with about a quarter inch of soil...quarter to 3/8 of an inch.
They're a hardy, tough seed, they'll pop up through just about anything.
Pat them down so you get good soil contact with the seed; good moisture soil seed contact.
You can plant radishes in wide rows as well; you can do a wide row and scatter them out
like we do a lot of our other leafy vegetables.
They tolerate that fairly tight spacing.
To make a wide bed, I like to use the back of my rake, make a bed.
I like to make it about a foot wide because that fits with my irrigation system, but that
does quite well.
You can start radishes in the spring - quite early - you can start them mid-March at least,
and have them grow - start growing - that way.
So, you have a crop through a long season with the radishes; a great...great plant to
grow for beginning gardeners.
Now to make your wide bed, just use the back of your rake.
A bed like this will be more than a normal family will eat; you do several of these and
you keep yourself in radishes for a long time.
Going to try to make it level so the water won't pool; again we're going to have to water
it down because we got dry soil, especially this year.
But we always have to water our soil in planting our garden.
All right, so what we want is a fairly level bed so we can soak this water in; put half
to an inch of water in there, let it soak down, that'll give us pretty good moisture
for the seed roots to grow down into.
So we'll run a little bit of water in here, we'll let that soak in, and then we'll plant
some radish seeds.
All right, the soil is wet, soaked down pretty good, grab a few radish seeds and we just
scatter them over the area.
It doesn't take very many; that will provide quite a few radishes, when you're ready to
harvest, you'll be ready to go with a small bed of radishes right there.
Cover them with about a quarter inch of soil; pat it down for good soil contact.
In a week or so we should have radishes popping up.
There you go: ready to go have some fun in your garden.