With the heat coming in, we’re focusing on one of our earliest harvests of the growing season! Radish! We’re always excited to begin our harvest and preservation efforts with this one.
Radish tend to be a bit finicky, definitely preferring cooler weather. We typically sow them two weeks to last frost, with our harvests beginning now through late June. Radish are not very field tolerant, they quickly develop a woody texture and cardboard like flavor if left too long. Once it starts warming up, it’s time to get them out as fast as you can.
If you’re growing in one of those cooler parts of the north, such as in coastal locations, radish can be a full season, bread and butter crop for you. But, if you live where it gets warm and missed this year’s short growing window, you can also do a late sow. If you do sow them “into the heat,” you’ll find they grow but don’t bulb out. So, typically, you’d direct sow them again about a month to your first frost so temperatures tend to get cooler.
We do try to eat our radish fresh, as much as we can. They make for an excellent garden snack and frequently are featured in salads. Generally speaking, they don’t hold up too well in the refrigerator, often providing only a few days where they remain crisp and tasty. There are some methods you can use to extend that out to a week or so, but that’s about as good as it gets.
Our preference is to perform a short-term preservation on them using quick pickling or fermentation techniques. We’ll talk about this preservation method a bit more in the future, but the gist is that both can get you into the 3-4 weeks range for radish preservation. This year, we favored a quick pickling and we used a sweet-forward recipe to mix things up a bit compared to our more typical savory recipes.
These quick pickled radish are an excellent and flexible topper. They might be “weird” because you don’t find them commercially available, but they’re tasty and can be used like any pickled or fermented vegetable. They can go on green salads or into any potato/pasta/chicken/tuna salad recipes. You can finely break them down for a zesty tartar sauce or even throw them down as a side dish or an element for charcuterie.
Quick pickling and fermenting like this can also feature other elements from the garden. For example, that can be dill, our last season’s onion harvest (still holding up!), a pepper or two or a bit of diced garlic or even full cloves. Our spices tend to focus around mustard seed, pepper corn and usually dried pepper flakes to kick the zest up a notch. You can also get creative there, too, if you want to push flavors a certain direction.
Lastly, a few of you know that our homestead basically borders wilderness and we’re immediately in the Gilmore Trail Fire area. We’re OK, but the last couple days have been a whirlwind to prep for evac and defense. We got downgraded from “set” to “ready” status last night, which definitely released some serious tension here. This morning’s news was wonderful to read, our wildfire crews have made significant progress and are well into mop up stages. We’re still on high alert, but we’re thrilled to be getting more good news than bad news!
