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When is a radish ready to pick


Tips for Growing and Picking

Like tomatoes, radishes are a vegetable you have to grow yourself in order to enjoy their true flavor and knowing when to harvest radish is the key to that enjoyment. Grocery store radishes often taste quite spicy, but radishes grown in your garden and harvested at the correct time have a mild flavor and add a crisp crunch to salads and sandwiches. Members of the cabbage family (Brassicaceae), like broccoli and kale, these delicious globes of white flesh are also fun to grow. Here’s how to know when to pick radishes for peak flavor.

I grow many different varieties of radish in my garden, including some beautifully colored ones.

Why is knowing when to harvest radish important?

Unlike some other crops which can be harvested on a rolling basis as they ripen (green beans, peppers, and cucumbers, I’m talking about you!), radishes are a “once and done” crop. Each radish seed yields one radish root. If you miss the correct planting or harvesting time for radishes, your yield will be a whole lot of leaves and no delicious roots or over-ripe roots that are cracked, woody, and bitter. If you’ve tried growing radish before only for the plants to never develop their classic scarlet globe roots, you know the exact disappointment I’m talking about.

No matter which radish varieties you grow, success is all about the right timing. And I’m referring to both the timing of the planting and the timing of the harvest.

‘Cherry Belle’ is a classic red radish, though there are many other types you should grow, too.

Radish is a cool weather-loving crop. If you wait too long to plant radish seeds, the weather and soil will be too warm, and no roots will form. The leaves may be large and robust, but the root will look more like a rat tail root than a radish. Peak planting times are very early spring for late spring harvests and late summer for fall harvests.

When the planting is properly timed, figuring out when to harvest radish isn’t difficult, and there are several methods you can use to determine when the roots are ready to be pulled.

Radishes harvested at the peak of flavor are not woody or overly spicy. They are crisp and flavorful. These ‘Easter Egg’ radishes are a favorite of my family.

When to harvest radish based on the planting date

Since radish seeds are most often planted in the very early spring, 4-6 weeks before your last spring frost, they are among the earliest spring harvests for most gardeners. In my Pennsylvania garden, our last expected spring frost date is May 15th, so I sow seeds into the garden straight out of the seed packet starting around the end of March. Then I continue to sow more radish seeds every week through April and until the end of May when the weather really starts to warm. Making multiple sowings like this keeps my family in radishes for weeks instead of days, and it keeps us from being overwhelmed with too many radishes all at once.

Sow a row of radish seeds every week to have a continuous harvest of roots.

One of the easiest ways to know when to harvest radish is to keep track of your planting dates. Most radish varieties are ready to be pulled 30 to 45 days after sowing the seeds. If you remember when you planted the seeds, it’s easy to determine the best harvesting date. Ripe radishes will only hold in the soil for a week or two past their peak. If you keep them in the ground too long, the roots taste bitter and the texture is woody. Plus, the plants will go to flower (which is great for the pollinators but not so good for the salad plate).

As mentioned earlier, late summer plantings can also be made for fall harvest. I start sowing more radish seeds in late August through September. They’re ready to pick 30-45 days after sowing.

It’s easy to base the harvest date on the planting date for radishes. Most are mature between 30 and 50 days after sowing.

When to harvest radish by their size

Another great way to know when to harvest radish is by the diameter of their roots. Typically, the “shoulders” of the roots stick out above the surface of the soil. This is totally normal and even serves as a good indicator of the maturity of your radish plants.

When they are seedlings, the top of the root gradually starts to color up and thicken. For classic round radish varieties, like Cherry Belle and Easter Egg, when the root’s diameter reaches about 1-inch across, they are ready for harvest. For oblong varieties, like White Icicle and French Breakfast (my favorite!), their root girth at maturity isn’t as thick since the roots are longer than they are wide. For these varieties, I harvest when the shoulder of the root is the same diameter as my thumb. Here again, don’t wait too long to harvest or the roots will split or become woody.

The “shoulders” of radishes often stick out of the soil, making it easy to see how large they are.

When to harvest radish based on the variety

Using the root size as a harvest indicator goes hand in hand with using the variety type as a harvest indicator since the variety determines the eventual size of the root. Generally speaking, a spring variety has thinner skin and won’t hold in the ground as long, while fall-planted winter radishes have thicker skins and can stay in the garden until the ground freezes even if they are fully mature. Some varieties are even bred specifically for fall and winter growing. Most that are, have a slightly longer maturation period; more like 50 to 60 days. China Rose and Watermelon radish are two wonderful winter varieties that are great for fall planting and late-season harvests. Many Daikon radish types can even be planted throughout the summer for fall and winter harvest.

Freshly harvested French Breakfast radishes are bright and crisp.

What to do if your radish roots don’t form

If your radish plants don’t form roots at all, there could be a few different factors at play.

  1. You may have planted them too late. Remember, earlier is better than later. Aim for cold weather and soil that is cold but no longer frozen.
  2. Even moisture is another key to success with radishes. If the soil dries out when the plants are just seedlings, the water stress will result in minimal “bulbing” of the roots.
  3. You planted too closely. Radish roots need room to grow and fully form. Sow the seeds ½ to 1 inch apart. Or thin them to that spacing when they are small seedlings.
  4. Do not feed radish fertilizers that are high in nitrogen. Nitrogen makes big leaves, not big roots. Use a balanced organic fertilizer or one that’s slightly higher in phosphorous (the middle number on the label) for the best results.
  5. Mulch your radish plants to help stabilize soil temperatures and cut down on competition from weeds. Use shredded leaves, straw, or finished compost.
  6. Test your soil pH every 3 to 4 years to be sure it falls in the optimum range for radish growth. 6.5 is an ideal target pH as that’s when the most nutrients are available to fuel plant growth. A pH that’s too high or too low can bind certain nutrients into the soil so plants can’t access them. (Learn more about managing soil pH here).
Radish is best planted by directly sowing the seeds into the garden soil when the weather is still cool. The plants do not like to be transplanted.

How to harvest radish roots

Aside from knowing when to harvest radish, it’s important to know how to harvest them. Round radishes are incredibly easy to harvest. They are shallow-rooted and a simple tug on the leaves is enough to uproot them. Oblong, oval, or deep-rooted radish types, like daikons, are a little more challenging. Use a trowel or garden fork to gently pry them out of the soil. Some of them can grow quite deep, so you’ll need to dig carefully.

Harvesting radishes is easy. Take a firm grasp of the foliage and pull up. Deep-rooted varieties may require a digging fork or trowel.

More tips for growing radish

Flea beetles are a common pest of radish plants. Thankfully the damage they cause is mostly aesthetic.

I hope you’ll enjoy cultivating your own homegrown roots with these tips on when to harvest radish and the accompanying info on how to time the plantings. They’ll become a fast favorite for both their flavor and their ease of growth.

Radishes make a great crop for containers. They don’t need a deep pot and thrive in potting soil mixed with compost.

Here are more articles on when to harvest various crops:

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3 Signs That Your Radishes Are Ready to Be Harvested from the Garden • Gardenary

Published October 26, 2022 by Nicole Burke

Filed Under:

radishes

when to harvest

harvest

How

Can You Tell When Radishes Are Ready?

I like my radishes a little bit spicy and 100% crisp. The problem is, since they’re growing underground, how can you tell when they’ve grown to perfection? 

My first couple of seasons growing radishes, I was nervous if anything was happening under the surface at all. My plants produced lots of lush green leaves above ground, but when I harvested them, I was disappointed by the tap root size. Over the years, I’ve learned three signs to look for to harvest perfect, salad-ready radishes. 

You're within the window of the time guideline on your radish seed packet

I know, this one seems obvious, but how many of us have tried to assemble a piece of furniture without reading the directions? I may ignore the spacing suggestions on the backs of those little seed packs, but I’ve found that their time-to-harvest estimates are usually pretty accurate, plus or minus 10 days or so, especially when the weather has been optimal.   

Let's say you're planting your first round of French breakfast radishes in early March. You'll come out about seven to ten days later to thin radish seedlings to give your top plants adequate space to grow their tap roots. You'll return in early April, or after about 30 days from planting (as the packet most likely recommends), to check on their growth.

Different types of radishes have different grow times, so be sure to check your packet. 

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The radish greens above the soil have grown to be 6 to 8 inches tall

It’s true for most plants that the root growth and the shoot growth imitate one another when it comes to pacing. As above, so below, so to speak. If you don't see a lot of green growth above the soil line, then there’s probably not much happening to your little radish root below either. On the other hand, if one shoot has grown significantly taller than its neighbors, the radish attached to it will probably be just a little too big. 

For French breakfast radishes, look for greens that are about six to eight inches tall. 

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The radish passes the shoulder test

The shoulder of a radish is the part that pushes up against the topsoil, the part that breaks through when you give the shoots overhead a good tug. Use your finger to sweep around the base of the greens a bit to see if you can feel the shoulders. If you don’t feel anything, the radish probably needs more time to develop, so just push the soil back in place to give the teenage radish more privacy.  

Sometimes, the radishes show you they’re ready to harvest by popping their shoulders above ground to say hi. They’re not likely to continue growing much once they’re bursting out of the ground, so that makes the decision to pull or not to pull really easy! 

What happens if you leave a radish in the soil too long?

When radishes are near their time to harvest, it’s really important to watch them. If you harvest them too late, they can become starchy. I wanted to grow huge radishes for a photoshoot one year; they may have looked camera-ready, but they ended up tasting awful. Here's how to salvage your radishes if you leave them in the soil too long. 

What can you plant after you've harvested your radishes?

Once you pull up your first batch of perfect radishes, you might be wondering what to do with that empty space in your garden. After all, the last thing you want to do is leave soil bare, right?

If you know that you're still going to have the right temperature for radishes for at least 30 more days, you can always plant a second round. Just add a handful of compost and sow more radish seeds in the areas you've just harvested your first round from. That way, you can keep enjoying radishes through the rest of your growing season! 

To me, that’s the beauty of a kitchen garden: you can keep coming back and planting more, growing more, so that there's always something to harvest.

If, however, you expect the weather to change soon, you can plant something else in that spot to prepare for the upcoming growing season. I recommend going with something from a different family, so you could, for example, grow bush beans to hang over the side of your raised garden bed, or you could add some basil as soon as you're frost-free. 

Learn the step by step to plant, set up, and grow your own organic salad garden and enjoy fresh greens at least six months each year.

Enjoy your perfect homegrown radishes!

I hope this guide has you harvesting crisp radishes of all different shapes and sizes in no time! 

For more tips on growing perfect French breakfast radishes, read my full growing suggestions. If you'd like to save your own radish seeds for next season, here's how to harvest and store seeds. 

Don’t forget: you can also eat the radish greens. That means radishes are double your money!

Happy growing, my friends. 

Features of growing radishes

Radishes are planted by almost all gardeners, at first glance it seems that it is quite simple. They grow it outdoors in the garden or in the country, in greenhouses, on the balcony and even in the apartment on the windowsill. Mostly one-year variety is common, but there are also biennial varieties of radish, they are little cultivated. Sometimes radishes grow dry, have a bitter taste, or the root crops crack. And it happens that instead of a tasty root crop, a flower arrow grows. How to grow radishes in order to get a tasty and juicy harvest?

Contents

Selecting and preparing seeds

There are 6 criteria to be aware of when selecting seeds:

  1. Select varieties and hybrids that have been bred specifically for your region and soil type.
  2. To collect several harvests during the whole summer, you need to plant different varieties, the differences of which are in the ripening time. There are ultra early variety (can be harvested in 2-3 weeks), early (harvest 3-4 weeks after planting), medium (4-6 weeks), late (8-10 weeks).
  3. Varieties genetically resistant to arrowheads have now appeared.
  4. It is good to buy treated seeds, in a special tape. They are easier to sow in the ground, cruciferous fleas are not afraid of seedlings.
  5. Be sure to take into account the expiration dates of the seeds, as they are very poorly stored.
  6. Buy only from specialist shops.

Many gardeners store their own seeds to save money. Seeds are collected exclusively from varietal radish, hybrid varieties are not suitable for this. After harvesting, leave a few plants in the ground to get seeds from them. Take care of them as well as before harvesting the main crop. After a few days, the plant begins to bloom, after which the pods appear, in which the seeds are located. You need to collect them as soon as they dry out and begin to turn yellow. They are well dried and stored in an airtight, clean, dry container.

Planting and care of seedlings

Radishes grow well on moderately acidic, loose, aerated soils. It is great to plant this root vegetable in a well-lit place where potatoes, peas, pumpkins, zucchini or tomatoes were grown before. You should not plant after cabbage and every time in one place, it is better to change the place of sowing every year.

In preparation for sowing, the beds need to be fertilized with sufficiently diluted manure, ash, dug up and loosened. Fertilizer with fresh manure will negatively affect the radish and attract various pests, it is better to make compost. It is necessary to sow at intervals of 4-5 centimeters, the row-to-row distance is about 15 centimeters. With this method of sowing, it will be possible to avoid unnecessary plants that must be removed later. After sowing, the seeds are lightly sprinkled with loose earth, rammed and watered abundantly from a watering can with a divider. The best seed planting depth is approximately 5 millimeters. Don't sow radishes too deep or they will turn fibrous.

Pay attention
Dry seeds sprout on the 3rd or 5th day, while those soaked for 10-15 minutes before planting will sprout much faster.

Pests and diseases

Radish belongs to the cabbage family (cruciferous), more resistant to diseases and pests than other crops, but still susceptible to many diseases. These include fungal diseases that lead to rotting of the roots, death and blackening of the leaves, such as bacteriosis, powdery mildew. Also, diseases of bacterial origin, which lead to growths on the surface of the radish fruits, to wilting of the leaves (keel). To prevent this from happening, it is necessary to disinfect the seeds in a dark purple solution of potassium permanganate, garlic pulp or aloe juice.

Also, radishes can be affected by many pests: cruciferous flea (very scary for young plants, eats leaves, after which the plant may die), cabbage fly (in some cases, the larvae destroy the entire crop), weevils, leaf beetles, cabbage moth, cabbage scoop , cruciferous bugs, larvae of click beetles, secretive trunk beetles, rapeseed sawflies.

It is necessary to irrigate the plants with tobacco dust, wood ash, Bordeaux mixture. Spray the beds with lime milk, it is absolutely safe for humans (1 glass of lime per 5 liters of water). Processing is carried out in dry, preferably calm weather, preferably in the evening, so that the product stays on the plant and in the soil as long as possible. Spinach, dill, lettuce can be planted along the edges of the beds. The most radical way to combat pests is to cover the beds with a special covering material - spunbond, density 17, under which you need to install small arches, and fix something heavy around the edges. When seedlings reach 5 centimeters, the film must be opened on one side for a day, closing in the evening. When the radish grows to 10 centimeters, the spunbond can be removed completely.

Care and watering

Radishes should be watered abundantly, every 2-3 days. On hot days, it is necessary to water the plants in the morning and in the evening to avoid drying out of the soil, since moisture should remain at a depth of 20-30 centimeters. Even with short-term drying, the root crops will become fibrous and hard, and when the drying is repeated, the radish will throw out an arrow instead of growing the root crop. With an excess of moisture, the fruits become watery and tasteless.

If the soil is properly fertilized before planting (applying humus, mineral fertilizers in the fall), there is no need to additionally feed the radish with fertilizers. If the land is depleted, it is necessary to fertilize with organic fertilizers, combining this with watering. For example, water with diluted slurry (1:10) or diluted bird droppings (1:20). Also, once a week, you can water the mash from chopped grass. If top dressing is too intense, this will cause rapid growth of foliage, as a result of which the roots will be born very small and elongated.

It is necessary to loosen the beds to a depth of 10 centimeters, being careful not to damage the roots, to allow air to enter them. You also need to weed the beds from weeds in a timely manner. To keep moisture in the soil longer, you need to mulch the beds with peat, compost or humus. Then the weeds will not grow and it will be possible to loosen the earth less often.

Radish Harvesting Features

There are a few guidelines for how and when to harvest radishes:

  1. Before pulling radishes out of the soil, make sure that the roots have reached the required size. If it is even less than 2.5 cm in diameter, it is left to ripen, sprinkled with earth.
  2. Early varieties ripen quickly, so check them as often as possible so as not to miss the moment of ripening. After overripe, the roots become lethargic and bitter in taste. This applies to all varieties, but to a greater extent to spring ones.
  3. When harvesting late varieties of radishes, it is important to have time to harvest before the first frost.
  4. After harvesting, store the radish harvest in the refrigerator, after cutting the tops.

The best stored crop is planted in August and harvested in mid-autumn.

Growing radishes is a simple, easy and inexpensive process. Radishes contain many vitamins and important microelements, especially valuable in spring, when there are no other fresh vegetables and greens yet, useful fiber and protein. This is a very low-calorie product (15 kcal per 100 g), used in various diets. It improves immunity, is useful during pregnancy for the harmonious growth of the fetus, lowers blood sugar levels, increases hemoglobin, promotes the removal of cholesterol, helps to remove edema, has a beneficial effect on the human cardiovascular system, fights cancer. It is highly undesirable to abuse radish for people with diseases of the thyroid gland, gallbladder, liver, duodenum and stomach ulcers.

Radish is a very tasty root vegetable. Radishes are mainly used in salads and cold soups.

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Contents


Harvesting planting material at home saves money, avoids regrading and the purchase of low-quality seeds. The process of collecting and preparing for storage has many subtleties: it is necessary to collect radish seeds for planting from a varietal plant, because hybrids do not pass on their own characteristics to the next generations. Previously, the bush selected for obtaining seed material must be isolated so that cross-pollination does not occur. And for long-term storage, the collected seeds must be properly prepared.

How to grow excellent seeds?

It is possible to grow radishes in order to obtain seeds from them in a direct and transplanted way. In the first case, the selected specimens are left to grow in the same place, carefully caring for them. The mother liquors should be large, well-developed plants of the desired variety.

With the transplant method, it will be possible to obtain seeds a month earlier, but this technology is more troublesome. Selected plants will need to be transplanted to a separate bed. The process will look like this:

  1. For radishes selected as queen cells with ripened roots, the tops are cut off, leaving stumps 4 cm high, and the root is shortened to 3-4 cm.
  2. Plants are transplanted to a new location and watered abundantly. The distance between them should be at least 40 cm. In the process of development, the queen cells increase their lush tops.
  3. Root crops are regularly watered, after wetting the soil, weeding and loosening are carried out.
  4. In mid-June, the queen cells are fed with a solution of chicken manure. The concentrate is pre-prepared by filling the bucket halfway with litter and pouring the remaining volume with clean water. After 5-6 days, the fertilizer can be applied, previously diluted with water in a ratio of 1:10.
  5. Do not allow crop damage by pests. If an aphid or a cruciferous flea has appeared on the bushes, insecticides should be immediately treated (Fastag, Tsunami, Arrivo, Inta-Vir, Taboo, Aktara, Fitoverm, Aktellik are suitable) .
  6. Arrows will soon appear on the queen cells, and then flowering and subsequent seed formation will begin. Bushes during this period can reach a height of 1.5 m, they will need support.


When the pods turn yellow, it's time to harvest. The color of ripe beans can have various shades - from beige to rich straw. On average, 15–2 g of seeds are obtained from one plant.

In order to provide yourself with a sufficient number of root crops, it is enough to allocate from 10 to 15 mother bushes for reproduction. When growing radishes for sale, the number of mother plants is increased. You can get seeds at home from any variety you like.

Collection and extraction of seeds

Radish seeds can be harvested 65-70 days after flowering. Usually the collection period falls on the beginning or middle of September. Work is carried out on a clear, dry day.

The beans are cut with secateurs, leaving part of the stem, tied into bundles and hung to dry in a dry ventilated room. It can be a barn, an attic, a glazed balcony.

You can tell when the pods are dry by the fact that they crumble easily when you squeeze them in your hand.

The dried pods are placed in a container of a suitable size (pan, bowl) and crushed until all the seeds are freed from the shell. Then the contents of the container are filled with water. Empty seeds and the remains of the pods will float to the surface.

Quality seeds will stay at the bottom. They are washed in clean water several times and laid out on a paper towel to dry. Dried seeds must be blown out in order to free them from small debris. It is convenient to do this with a fan or a special fan.

Seed storage rules

Dried and cleaned seeds are packed in a fabric bag made of natural material or in a paper bag.

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