If you’ve read my tomatoes and pepper growing experiences, from very bad to very productive, growing radishes is somewhere in between. I planted radishes 4 times in 5 months and my experience was very different: from no roots developed, to amazingly perfect radishes, woody radishes and finally getting flowers instead of roots.
The good part of this is that I know exactly what went wrong and I know as well why one of the harvests was so good, so I am going to share it with you.
Correct growing conditions for radishes
Temperature
Germination duration: 3 to 6 days.
Germination temperature: min 5 C, optimum 30 C, maximum 35 C.
Best growing temperature and best shape of the root will be obtained at temperature between 10 to 18 C (so make sure you are planting them in the cool season).
Soil
They like good moisture and well drained soil. I can’t emphasize this enough – make sure your soil can drain well and doesn’t retain too much water, otherwise they won’t develop good roots. Your soil needs to contain perlite or vermiculite for good aeration and drainage, but also some peat moss for retaining the necessary water.
Nutrition
I used fertilizer high in hydrogen maximum once or twice, but if the soil mixture contains already some fertilizer, no additional food is required for the entire life of the plant.
Pests
The plants weren’t attacked heavily, maybe few leaves were chewed by some caterpillars and one radish was eaten by an unknown “attacker”:
Here is an example of successful harvest, growing time was 60 days:
For this batch I replanted a seed every time I harvested a radish and they kept growing:
What can go wrong
Not well drained soil
This was my first mistake with radishes. I used a general cheap soil, with no vermiculite or perlite and it wasn’t draining too well. At the same time if I tried to water less, it did not retain water and was drying very fast (that is why it is good if your soil contains peat moss, which retains water and perlite which allows good draining). The roots did not develop at all after 40 days:
As a test, I took one of the above undeveloped plants and potted it separately in a good quality soil and here are the results – the perlite in the soil and presence of peat does make a difference and the harvest was successful:
I have planted a second batch in the same type of soil, this time having a lot more patience and after 80!!!! days, the roots developed but were very tiny and eventually they became woody and bitter, basically inedible:
Too hot weather
Since I saw that the good quality soil is working very well, I planted another batch. However, the temperature started to get as high as 30-35 C during the day and 15-20 C during the night and the plants became yellow, developed long stems instead of roots and eventually bolted (formed flowers instead of roots):
The morale of the story
As you can see I planted twice in a bad soil and twice my harvest was unsuccessful. The proof being that moving one plant to good soil changed the plant into a healthy radish.
So I can say it is easy to plant radishes, just make sure you have a well drained soil that won’t clay up and that the temperature won’t go above 30 and you are ready to go!