- This video is to show you
one of the fastest vegetables you can grow
that will give you great satisfaction just by sheer speed.
These radish in my hand, I sowed on the sixth of February
and it's now the 19th of April.
So these were sown in the middle of winter
in a greenhouse, I'll show you the method.
So sown under cover then planted out,
covered over with fleece row cover
that keeps the cold winds off.
And in two and a half months,
you have lots of food to eat.
And the nice thing about doing early radish like this
is they taste milder.
They're not gonna bite your mouth off.
And there's lots of tasty food there.
Now, you can sow radish seeds direct
or you can do what I'm going to show you here,
which is sowing them in module tray cells or plugs
using compost undercover
which means in this case in a greenhouse
or it could be in a polytunnels,
it could be in a conservatory.
It could be in a cold frame.
And then these radish seedlings are gonna grow up
in the tray to plant outside
in maybe a month.
This is the first sowing here, in this case
So it's still pretty cool.
There was a frost this morning.
And so the seedlings
are not going to grow very rapidly.
But radish are one of many vegetables
which grow very well in cool conditions.
In fact, when you grow radish in lower temperatures,
they are not so hot.
So autumn radish is good and spring radish is good.
It's one vegetable personally, I would not grow
in the summer, but if you like hot, that's good.
So what I'm doing here is popping compost,
pushing it down into the cells.
And this particular compost is homemade.
You can see there's quite a few bits and pieces in there
bits of wooden things, which actually don't matter
in terms of growing seedlings like this.
It might matter if you're trying to grow
something like celery with very small seeds,
but these radish are quite big.
So what I want to do is get the compost in here quite firm
so that when the radish seeds are sown
the compost is not dropping out at the bottom.
And here we already have, so I'll just make another,
a little indentation for the seeds
and then they can be sown.
And then I'm going to
cover them with a little bit of compost,
water the tray,
and that's it.
But the interesting thing with radish
and many other vegetables seeds is
you can sow more than one in a cell,
I'm aiming for four here.
Now this takes a little while
but I'm not being too exact.
I'm aiming for four.
And some cells are getting three
some are getting five.
It actually is not critical.
If we could get four seedlings in a cell,
that would be superb
because I found that that way you get a nice even size
without them being too crowded.
But in fact, as I'm going along here,
I'm gonna try something a bit
which is this seed is already a year old,
in other words, I bought it last year.
So in fact, it's probably two years old or even more
because it would have been grown the year before.
So this seed has got a bit of age on it,
which means it may not germinate quite as rapidly
and readily as it did last year.
Therefore, I'll just try on this half of the tray
sowing a few more seeds, I'm going up to six here.
And if they all came up and it was looking really crowded
one can always do some thinning.
So, you know, there's many options
but you can make yourself a lot of work
if you really go for it too much
and bring in way too many seeds.
So I've averaged around six there
and around four at that end.
And now I'm just going to cover with a bit of composite.
This by the way, because it's homemade compost
we'll have some weed seeds in,
and that is one not so ideal part of using
your own compost for potting.
Some people go to great lengths
and they cook it in the oven,
which is a way of killing the weed seeds.
I'm not bothering to do that because actually
I don't think there are too many weeds seeds here
but we will find out when these seedlings come up,
which will be, could be as long as two weeks or quicker.
I've done this by the way to catch the spare compost.
And then
the tray it's pretty well sealed
not dropping any compost, I'm just going to water it.
Yeah, so germination rate is going to be affected
by temperature
and the germination stage is the best time
to give temperature.
So if I take this into the house
and put it on a window seal, or have a heat matter here
or a hot bed or whatever it might be,
that will germinate more quickly
and we'll see how that's gone very shortly.
These are the radish which I sowed just three weeks ago,
it's now late February,
it's still winter.
It's been quite mild today.
These have been going undercover the all the time,
germinated in the house,
then carrying on growing in the greenhouse
and I've just brought them out of the greenhouse
straight now, no hardening off.
And they're gonna go into this soil
which is actually no dig.
So compost on the surface
and I've got my trustee wooden dibble,
which is brilliant for making holes in the bed.
And my plan is that I'm sowing,
dipping lines, eight little lines here
and next to the radishes is some soil,
which has been here all of last summer and winter,
and I've got fleece already on the soil.
And the plan is to then drop the fleece
over the radish as well,
because we are still very early in the season.
Radish are hardy plants
but they do not like being too windy more than anything,
the cold winds at this time of year.
So the plants went in pretty deep.
You might have noticed
some of them almost disappeared there, and that is good.
That means they certainly won't dry up
but also with the cold winds,
they can be a bit protected
and further protected by this fleece.
So this fleece is really light and that means that
you can safely put it as I'm doing here
right on top of the little seedlings and their leaves
and the advantage, the positive advantage of doing this.
Well, the two main ones keeps the warmth in
closer to the plants
and it means there's less risk of it blowing away.
We get gales here.
I had some big ones last week.
And so this means the fleece is not gonna blow away,
it's gonna stay right here
and keep these seedlings nice and cozy.
And I didn't (mumbles) them in
cause it's gonna rain any minute.
And this is pretty much walk away
and come back and harvest actually,
we don't need like, there's gonna be some nice radish here
in about a month or so maybe five weeks.
It's now the 30th of March,
and finally we have some quite warm weather.
It's been 17 degrees, 63 Fahrenheit today
to give you an idea.
And the radish have grown steadily through March slowly.
There's no rush to pick them
because until it gets really hot the radish don't get hot.
In cool spring weather, they develop slowly and stay mild.
So they've had this fleece on the whole time since planting
in late February.
And I'm just gonna pull it back here.
So we'll see what's going on there.
I've actually not pulled this fleece back
except once to have a little peak.
I haven't touched the plants at all, I haven't weeded.
So what you're seeing
is just the radish growing
in the surface compost,
which I spread last Christmas time.
And yeah, I'm seeing little radishes here.
Just before I pull one out, I'll just show you the weeds.
You can see a few weeds are growing
and harvesting time is always a very good opportunity
to do a bit of weeding.
There really aren't very many for this whole area,
it looks like there's about eight or 10 weeds.
That's all that's grown
while these radish have grown
from being a seedling to harvest stage.
So let's have a look
and they're in that little clumps.
I'm just pulling one out of a clump there.
And each clump
it's the same as with beetroot
that you get a big one often
and you can harvest that one
and then leave the others to grow in a bit.
It's a bit nip and tuck there.
They're not that big to be honest
but it's to give you an idea of how you can have a harvest.
When you grow your own, you can have a harvest at any stage.
It's one of the loveliest things.
You know, if you go to the supermarket
or the store, you just have to accept
what they've decided is the appropriate time to harvest.
Whereas homegrown, if you're the kind of person
who likes really little radishes like this
they're actually, they are much sweeter.
So you're not gonna fill up the plate in the same way,
but they're nice.
And I see here, I'm pretty impressed
for four weeks of growth
in late winter, early spring,
this is really not bad.
This variety Poloneza
has very pretty little white bottoms.
And in order to get them ready for eating
all you need to do, what I would do is
I'll just pinch off the root like this, using my thumb nail
and then I'm gonna give them a little rinse
and then, that's gonna be ready to taste.
There it is.
And that actually, this is an exciting moment
because this is the first harvest
of the spring
of seed sown already since the new year,
because radish is so, so fast.
So if you want a rapid meal,
have a think about this.
So four seeds in a clump
and it's only two months since they were sown.
Radishes liking to grow in cool weather means
they're also very suitable to sow in the autumn,
and it was actually a photograph I took here
for my diary that I bought out last December
and it's radish that was sown on September the 12th
in between some lettuce.
And they came up with no trouble at all
and grew very slowly through the autumn
cause the autumn not hot.
And we harvested in a very long period.
You can see I must say that
that photograph was taken third week in October
and they even stood some frosts.
So these little beauties are nice to eat
both in the spring
and in the autumn and early winter.
And that is not a hot radish,
that's a lovely, smooth, creamy,
creamy looking and mild testing.
Actually quite sweet root.
Just after harvesting the radish
from the sowing on the sixth of February,
it's now 30th of March.
I'm taking fleece off some
we firstly actually that's some turnips
that we planted as plants on the 14th of March.
So that's two and a half weeks ago.
They went into the ground as little plants.
And here we have some more radish
which I sowed direct as seed
again on the 14th of March.
So these radish have been growing here
in this bed for only 16 days.
And you can see that they're quite
vigorous little seedlings already
and you can see the little red stems
where the radish will start to grow.
And taking the fleece off at this stage
is a very good opportunity to do some weeding
because there are a few.
And for me this is as many as it gets really
not too many weeds
because with no dig, you just don't get a lot,
not as many as when soil is disturbed
and because it's dry weather,
I'm just pulling them out
without much fuss.
Really you can see it's just a job of a minute or two.
So weed that whole area
and these five rows of radish,
sown 16 days ago,
will crop
probably in about four weeks or within four weeks.
So it's gonna be about six weeks from sowing to harvest.
And that's gonna take us
actually towards some quite warm weather potentially
early or late April, early May.
So that's about for me here with our weather,
I don't usually reckon to have radish for harvesting
much later than that,
because I do find that as the weather warms up,
they get pretty hot.
And just in case, you're wondering here we have
red kohlrabi, or purple kohlrabi rather.
And that is
an early variety,
which will bulb up in June.
So basically this whole bed is Brassica family
which we are gonna crop in early summer.
And that means I can then,
there'll be time for planting,
probably beetroot or French beans afterwards.