Radishes in Sprout 5/17/22 Ended

[areyoukittenme]

You could grow them in a Bounty seed starter and get 50 radishes at a time!

[lynnee]

It's day 19, and there are at least 2 radishes that are large enough to harvest. I'm giving them until Monday, though. Photos will come after the first harvest.

[lynnee]

It's the Day 21 (6/6/22) Radish Reveal!

The left and center rows of the Sprout seed starter did fine. The sponges pulled easily out of the seed starter, and the radishes pulled easily out of the sponges, leaving only a few sponge bits attached. The radishes are reasonably globe-shaped.

It was time to add plant food, so I added another 4ml of AG nutes for the remaining radishes. Most of these were blocked from the light by the foliage from the ones that received extra light from the neighboring Bounty.   I filled the empty holes with empty sponges.  It remains to be seen whether the remaining plants will develop into radishes.

I'll be growing radishes in seed starters from now on!  Very little attention is required beyond pulling up the plants occasionally to keep the sponges from getting wedged in. I have a Farm seed starter that I may use for a quick radish crop whenever I'm trying to decide on the next long-term project.

[scarfguy]

WELL...

How do they taste!

[Shawn]

You did really good with them.  Repeating what scarfguy said, How did they taste?

[areyoukittenme]

What a fabulous outcome! Awesome idea, lynnee !

[lynnee]

Jun 6, 2022 15:33:49 GMT -5 scarfguy said:

WELL...

How do they taste!

They taste like retail radishes, only fresher! They are mildly hot. H says they are 'tangy".

The texture is dense, not watery. At some point I need to figure out what the best nutrients might be. These were grown with the Sprout normal 4ml AG nutes every two weeks. Normal for a seed starter is half the label amount of AG nutes.

[Sher]

lynnee, they really turned out well! I will copy your seed starter method the next time I grow radishes.

Thanks for discovering the BEST AG method for growing them.

i used to watch a great soil gardening vlog. They cautioned against adding nutrients to soil when growing radishes because if you fertilize them, they grow huge tops and the radishes don't need the extra nutrients.

So your half strength nutrients were probably on target.

[lynnee]

Jun 6, 2022 22:19:39 GMT -5 Sher said:

lynnee , they really turned out well! I will copy your seed starter method the next time I grow radishes.

Thanks for discovering the BEST AG method for growing them.

i used to watch a great soil gardening vlog. They cautioned against adding nutrients to soil when growing radishes because if you fertilize them, they grow huge tops and the radishes don't need the extra nutrients.

So your half strength nutrients were probably on target.

Sher , I actually used full strength nutrients. I figured that they were high growth mode plants rather than germinating seeds.

Next time I will try a 3/4 amount of nutrients, per your advice. The leaves did grow larger than the leaves on the same variety grown in a Bounty.

What I like about the seed starter is that the radish does most of the work of staying above the deck. The radishes themselves split those sponges!

[Sher]

And it was so much fun to see how they split the sponges, lynnee!

[lynnee]

6/13/22 Day 27, I think. The radish that was already developing before the others were harvested is ready to be harvested today. The others have thickened their stems, but are developing slowly. I think I'll be ending this project very soon.

[Shawn]

You did well with these buggers.  But all good things come to an end ...  then we start new ones

[lynnee]

Ended this project today (6/17/22).

With the light-hoggers removed, the remaining radishes all developed further. It's fairly clear, though, that even fast-growers like radishes prefer light that is stronger than 10w.

From now on, I'll use the Sprout only in places where supplemental light is available.  

[areyoukittenme]

This was such a cool experiment, lynnee! If I grow radishes in my AGs I'll definitely do it this way.