The Radish Problem

My face feels flush. My thoughts turn squirrely. The air is tense. Edgy. Charged. 

I close my eyes and exhale. 

This isn’t the first time I’ve steered into this testy terrain, but I’m learning how to read my tells.

Like now - we’ve been talking about radishes for the past hour and a half. It started off by narrowing down the crop list for the season. This inevitably led us to consider what happens after the summer crops come out — how we flip those beds, and what we plant next for fall and winter storage.

Enter: the radish.

How many seeds of radish would we need? 

Well, to fill a 50 ft bed with 5 rows, we need to consider plant spacing. At 6-inch spacing per plant, that comes out to roughly 500 plants per bed.

But then - how fast will the radishes mature? So when would the radishes need to be in the ground? Are we harvesting the radishes all at once? Where are we washing them? Do we need a wash station? Where would we store the radishes? How long do they last? Are we bunching them? Bagging them? Would we grow one variety? Multiple? 

Daikon radish? 

French Breakfast radish? 

Watermelon radish? 

Cherry-Belle radish? 

Drew looks at me, exasperated, “I don’t even like radishes anymore!”

It’s easy to drown in the details, but we snap each other back to the point of it all:

We want to build something real.

Something slow.

Something that we believe in.

And yes, we’re growing Black Spanish radishes.