OK, so we’re going to talk about one of the most unassumingly difficult vegetables to “properly” grow that we are aware of. We can practically guarantee you wouldn’t see it coming as it checks all the boxes for cold climate growing!
Radicchio is a surprisingly hard nut to crack. If you’re familiar with radicchio, you know that you’re expecting a relatively compact head, somewhat like a cabbage. Some varieties grow a bit more elongated, but they all share that somewhat compact head like appearance. They are not “just another lettuce” variety. Radicchio has a somewhat odd lineage and although it’s commonly referred to as a leaf vegetable, it actually comes from the Asteraceae (aka Aster, like the flower) family.
For many years, we struggled with achieving anything like a head with our radicchio, even using several different varieties. All of our attempts were using intensive gardening techniques, as we use for all of our leaf greens. The typical recommended spacing is at 8 inches, which translates to about two plants per square foot when using square foot gardening methods. But, no matter what we did, we could not get a head to properly develop. Even shifting to French intensive gardening (which maintains row spacing) had the same result.
Then, two years ago, on a whim we decided to grow radicchio at our in-ground gardens. This garden offers much larger plant spacing at a minimum of 24 inches between plants. Sure enough, that was exactly the breakthrough we needed. Our raddichio developed full sized heads and for once, actually looked like a raddichio you might buy in the store! The plants really developed, practically taking every bit of spacing we offered to it and they became exceptionally large plants. We were absolutely thrilled that we’d finally “figured out” this surprisingly difficult plant that had thrown us so much trouble over the years!
We were able to surmise that radicchio is highly sensitive to spacing and does not like competition at all. This wasn’t at all weird to us, we’ve encountered quite a few types of plants that are like that. Also, we’ve modified the spacing guidelines of several plants based on experience, given how heavily we leverage intensive growing techniques across our gardens.
Well, a couple of inadvertent oversights later, here we are again. Long story short, we ran out of radicchio seed last year and this year, we forgot to reserve room at our in-ground gardens for our radicchio. Woops! So, back to our intensively grown raised beds it was!
And, guess what? Even with a spacious 12 inch spacing, which would seem fully adequate, we’re still not seeing a radicchio head develop on our plants! It seems like if the plant merely touches another plant it’s just going to decide not to produce a head! How utterly ridiculous! There’s plenty of plants that are sensitive to competition, but radicchio was not on our bingo card to be one of them!
So, yeah, lessons have been learned. We thought this might be interesting for those that might be struggling with growing radicchio. But, more interestingly, our experience with radicchio also offers several overarching “bigger lessons” that we can talk about!
Sometimes the information on growing is wrong, even if it comes from a seed packet or well trusted sources. Growing very much benefits from diagnostic-like efforts, sometimes you have to change variables until you figure it out. Also, sometimes it takes many years to develop expertise in certain plants! Just because you’re good at many things, doesn’t mean you’re good at everything! There’s so many great things that growing teaches us!
This experience might be unique to the subarctic, too, so we’d love for other radicchio growers to weigh in! What say you, fellow frosty gardeners?
