Radish Report Card

About 4 weeks ago, I planted some radish seeds. Just for fun, since I'd never really tasted a radish outside of the thinly-sliced and rather bland ones found in the premixed fast-food restaurant salads. But what the hey. Its my dirt, right? I can grow anything I want, which includes foods I could potentially dislike.

Turns out, radishes grow like gangbusters! From the above-ground growth, you would have thought the radishes underneath were fist-sized. The stalks they grew were huge.



I read reports that radishes are supposed to be finished growing in 3-4 weeks, so in the fourth week, I decided to have a Radish Harvest.

And the results were not exactly what I expected. I have assigned grades to this graduating class of radishes, and as you will plainly see in the next few pictures, there is apparently a Radish Bell Curve of some sort going on in the garden.


Radishes, Class of '09

Our first group are the honor roll students, but unfortunately I am still only giving them an A-minus... (The salutatorian is looking a little shrimpy.)



These guys are somewhere in the B range. Not too terrible, but also not quite radish-shaped. More like radish tubes. Radish cylinders.



We start to see them go a little crooked in the C-plus group...



And this guy never showed up to class and gave the teacher lip, so he was kicked out of radish school for insubordinate behavior.



A good scrubdown and some slicing and dicing (and some googling to figure out how people are supposed to eat these things), and I decided to try my first (non-McDonalds) radish with a little goat cheese and some chopped up chives (also from the herb garden because yay, I grew some chives too!).



Pretty to look at, and rather peppery to eat. Overall, though? Not half bad. I planted two more rows of radishes that same day, so hopefully we can harvest them before it gets too hot this summer. We've had a rash of thunderstorms lately which has kept things cool, and that has resulted in a lettuce bounty.



I bought me a nice big container of Kraft Ranch Dressing to slather all over this stuff. Because nothing says classy city girl like a delicate mixed-greens salad drowning in ranch dressing. Pass me them napkins, ya'll.