A couple of weeks ago we planted a bed of daikon radishes from the seeds we saved in spring:
The radishes were a mix of large Japanese daikon types with Johnny’s “Red King II” hybrid daikon.
There were also some white egg-shaped daikons in the mix. Who knows what we’ll get now!
We just grew a roughly 4′ x 6′ patch of mixed types until they went to seed, then saved the seeds.
Now we have planted them for the second time this year, taking advantage of the cooler weather to see if we can get a harvest before the hard freezes come.
We planted them in bare soil, then mulched with some of the compost we made from a mix of expired bread and hay.
It’s been so dry that the compost didn’t break down completely, yet it makes nice mulch.
I originally wanted to leave the entire area covered in mulch, yet when we pulled our sweet potatoes there were a lot of weeds mixed in so we simply raked the mulch off the entire area and weeded it, then made a couple of raised beds, planted them, and now we’re re-mulching.
The worst of the weeds was Bermuda grass, which has a way of running through mulch and knitting it all together. Though it would have been ideal to keep the ground covered, we live in an imperfect world, so we simply through the mulch and the Bermuda grass and other weeds over the fence to the chickens and started with a clean slate.
It will be fascinating to see how these daikons turn out. The Red King II hybrid is a really excellent radish and I hope its genetics can be carried over into a stable open-pollinated variety.
I probably shouldn’t have mixed multiple other radishes with it, but it’s too late now. We’ll roll the dice and see what happens.
All the radishes we harvested were pretty good this year. Perhaps we’ll get an even better race over time which is adapted to Lower Alabama.
David The Good
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