A radish variety with a classic taste and exceptional quality
The Japanese minowase is one vegetable you must try growing in your garden
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So just like other radish varieties
we recommend that you sow radish seeds directly
in the soil and although radish is a cool season crop
in places like California where the weather is
pretty much moderate throughout the year you can grow radish year-round
We're growing our radish in raised beds here
so we need to make sure that this soil that
we're using for our radish is pretty loose
and contains some kind of porous material
like perlite which we have used here if you're growing radish in the ground
make sure that
you dig at least 6 inches below the soil surface
so that the soil is nice and loose make sure you add a lot of organic material like
compost
which will improve the texture of your soil the Japanese minowase radish
sends out these big roots that develops into
big radishes so you want to make sure that the soil is loose enough
for the plants to send out these roots into the soil
and this is what well give you large harvests of radish
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so it takes about 10 days for the seedlings to emerge
and once the seedlings have emerged you need to make sure that that
you thin the radish seedlings to
one plant per spot. To do that just
remove the plant that's not so healthy
and you should be left with one plant
in one spot. Now what I'm doing here is that that I'm providing a little bit
of support
to some of these radish seedlings that have fallen over
and as the seedlings grow, they will become stronger
and they will start sending out their roots deeper into the soil
so this is just a temporary measure by which you can
make sure that the seedlings are supported well you can do this for all
the seedlings
and if you're growing in rows, doing this is a lot easier
and this is also a good time: to start
thinking about adding fertilizer water soluble fertilizers every two weeks
or if you prefer to use slow release fertilizers
you can add them now the seedlings will require some kind of
nutrition to start growing and for these plants I've used
fish and seaweed fertilizer which is one of my favorite fertilizers to use
and I've been using it every two weeks
till the plants are well established
So after 45 days you can see that the plants now look pretty healthy
and
they've started growing bigger and you can see that the spacing that we started off
with now actually look smaller the plants will get bigger and bigger
and you will see that it'll start getting crowded
around the plants now but this is okay because
radishes can grow quite close together
and
76 days after planting you can now start harvesting your
radish and as you can see here this
radish is pretty big, pretty stout
and has a great pungent flavor so all in all this is a great radish variety
to grow
now I grow radishes not only for
their roots but also their Greens so I make sure that while the
radish has grown to about this size I
do add a high Nitrogen fertilizer like blood meal
which causes a lot of greens to grow
now if you're growing radish for just the roots
then you should stop adding fertilizer once the plants are established
what this will do is it will force the plants
to concentrated its energy on building the roots
while not producing a lot of greens however if you've not tried
radish greens I would highly recommend that you do try it out
it tastes absolutely delicious you can eat it cooked
it's got a nice pungent flavor to it I usually
boil the leaves and then mix it with lentils and
prepare it with a lot of other vegetables as well
and it tastes really nice
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snails and slugs do feed
on the leaves of this radish plant however
other than that I did not see any other
insects that caused any damage to this
Japanese minowase radish plant and I also wanted to talk a little bit about
the taste of the this radish
the Japanese minowase radish is
one of the more pungent varieties of radish that you can grow
and eat. So it does have the classic
radish flavor the pungent flavor that you would expect from
radish and is definitely not a mild variety
so if you like pungent radish you will love this radish variety
and it also grows into a pretty big
roots so the amount of radish that you get
for the space that you use is pretty good
you can get a lot of radish from just a small area
And the Japanese minowase radish is
also called the daikon radish however i've seen that the diakon is a special
variety
that grows really huge roots so
this minowase radish is a little bit different from the diakon
varieties
although the minowase is is also called the diakon by some folks
we had an unusually hot January this year
so you can see that this radish plant has sent
out some flowers and this is a sign that the plan has gone
to bolt which means that it will not produce
roots anymore but flowers and seeds will be produced
so I'd like to know from you my YouTube viewers
what kind of radish variety have you grown. Have you grown
the minowase the Japanese minowase variety
or do you have your own favorite variety that you grew
do let me know I'll see you again soon
until then Happy Gardening!
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