Raise radishes in pots

RADISH

If you like a little fire, crunch and colour in your salads, growing a pot of radishes is for you. It’s not just the peppery roots that taste good; radish greens make a worthy salad addition, too. Very little goes to waste.

Also, radishes can be ready for harvest in as little as five weeks from sowing seed, so you don’t have to wait long to enjoy them at their crisp and zesty best, straight out of the pot and onto the plate. Sow some seed every few weeks and you’ll never run out.

Radish plants don’t take up much room, and they are very shallow-rooted, so you won’t need a big or deep pot. Trough pots are a good option – many of us have at least one of these lying around – and they can be positioned nicely on the edge of a balcony or patio, or even on a windowsill.

Getting a crop underway is dead easy. Just fill your shallow container with a good quality potting mix, scatter some seed over the top, cover with 5mm of additional mix and water in. Keep moist and they’ll come up in about 4–8 days. Water regularly and liquid-fertilise every week or two. There’s no need to thin excess seedlings until they reach a size that’s worth adding to your salad (3–4 weeks). After you’ve finished harvesting all the roots, sow some more seed in the same pot. You should be able to grow 2–3 successive crops of radish before you need to replace the mix.

The only tough thing about growing radish is choosing a variety – there’s much more to the humble radish than those little red balls that you see in the supermarket. Heirloom varieties are available in shades of gold, plum, pink, white and watermelon. Some are long, like the classic French Breakfast heirloom. Then, of course, there is the giant daikon radish, but you’ll need a much deeper pot to grow some of those!