While I am not a fan of radishes myself, Linda likes them every-so-often, but when I grow them I tend to forget about them in amongst all of the other stuff until they are humongous and too old and bitter. That was before I witnessed something when I was working with my friend John, teaching veggie growing and cooking to primary school kids.
The idea was that they sowed seed of various sorts directly into small newspaper pots filled with potting mix, which they would then label with their name and the type of veggie. As one of the activities they would even make the newspaper pots and then fill them just before sowing. John would then take the filled newspaper pots in nursery trays and keep the watered on capillary beds in a greenhouse which he had access to. On some occasions the class might not be available when required for planting out and some of the veggies were left a bit long.
As it happened, some of the veggies which did get left were radishes. They were a small spherical radish, the variety being ‘cherry belle’. They sat nicely in the newspaper pots and looked well grown and tasty (if you liked radishes) and so I wondered if I could grow them that way deliberately! Hence my experimentation!
The experiment!
I got hold of some cherry belle radish seed and made up four of our usual newspaper pots and filled them with my standard seed raising/potting mix. I then planted two seeds in each, about 5-6mm deep in the potting mix and placed the filled newspaper pots in a line at the front of one of the capillary beds in the greenhouse. That was on the Wednesday.
During the week I regularly checked to make sure there was water in the bottles in the capillary beds because at this point it was pretty warm.
The following Wednesday I did the same thing, the previous week’s seeds had germinated and I removed the weakest seedling from each newspaper pot, leaving the stronger one to carry on. I checked with my mate John and he said he did apply some soluble fertiliser (usually seaweed based) every week or two, so I applied a small amount of seaweed fertiliser diluted to the correct concentration on the Sunday, and applied it to all seedlings in the experiment every week on the Sunday afternoon.
I followed this process for 6 weeks so that by this point I had six sets of four newspaper pots with a germinated cherry belle radish seed in each.
Results & Observations
1. All of the seeds germinated pretty well and it was rare to only have one seed come up in a newspaper pot.
2. The first seeds in this experiment, germinated and sent up a few leaves and basically that was it! The radish didn’t get any bigger even though some of the seeds planted after these ones started to form a radish quite quickly, this set never got beyond a red stem where the radish should form. I discarded them after about 4 weeks.
3. Of the rest, there was considerable variability of yield, to the point that in one set of four, see photo below, one radish was almost to harvestable size while another, sown at the same time, into the same batch of seed raising mix, fertilised at the same time, was barely a stem.
Conclusion
I am not sure why there was this level of variability but can only conclude it was something to do with the seed. While the process does work, if you are a radish enthusiast more than four plants would have to be sown per week to take into account the variability of the result.
PS if you want to know how to make newspaper pots, click here!
