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radishes

The Radish Capital of America

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When we moved to Long Beach, MS, we did not know that it had once been known as the Radish Capital of America. That information appears in the history of the town as posted on the website of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Museum of Photography.

Radishes from our garden.

Had we known, we might have tried to move here sooner. My Joe loves radishes.

I did some hunting in the old newspaper archives (online) of the Library of Congress to see what additional information I could find about the radishes here. This is some of what I found:

From the Mississippi Gulf Coast the Northern market is supplied with the early radish and lettuce, beans and potatoes. Long Beach is called the radish town. The early radish built up this agricultural community, and prosperity smiles upon this well-built-up town, with its thrifty and enterprising citizens from the North and West, who have invested both their money and brawn in the soil.

The Sea Coast Echo, October 2, 1909, in Bay St. Louis, MS

The truckers of Longbeach and other coast points are shipping a great deal of radishes, lettuce and other produce to Northern markets and receiving handsome figures for it. They are in a position to reach markets early and get the highest possible prices. Think of Mississippi shipping vegetables in January, and that, too, raised without the aid of glass or other artificial methods. It is a great old State and the sooner our people fully appreciate that fact the better for all concerned.

The Oxford Eagle, February 1, 1906, in Oxford, MS — note: “truckers” refers to truck farmers

Long Beach, Miss., March 12 – Thirteen cars of vegetables were shipped from this parish last week, radishes, lettuce, shallots, carrots, turnips and cabbage making the variety.

St. Tammany Farmer, March 18, 1911, St. Tammany, LA — note: “cars” refers to train cars, not automobiles

The Long Beach truck farmers are rushing shipments of radishes to the Northern markets for Thanksgiving Day.

The Port Gibson Reveille, November 18, 1909, Port Gibson, MS

And then there was this great little story:

Red radishes, four round types and three long types, in a shallow basket
The long ones are ‘Cincinnati Market’ radishes.

Long Beach, Miss., is the home of the radish king in the Mississippi Valley. His name is Richard Inglis, and five years ago he visited Mississippi on an excursion from Youngstown, O. Having his eyes with him, he perceived such wasted opportunities that he paid $6 an acre for 20 acres of sandy loam which seemed suited for vegetables. Since then he has purchased 200 acres adjoining his original purchase, but he had to pay $35 an acre as the penalty for demonstrating to the natives what the land was really worth. There is more money in radishes than in anything else, because they mature in 20 to 50 days, according to the weather and the amount of fertilizer, and four crops can be raised on the same ground during the same season. Smith and Inglis have raised as high as 100 barrels of radishes to the acre, counting 600 bunches of five each to the barrel.

The Democratic Advocate, April 9, 1909, Westminster, MD

The radish that was grown here back in the early 1900s, that boosted the livelihoods of so many farmers, was not one of the small round radishes that we mostly see in stores today. Instead, it was a longer radish.

In 2018, MS Extension published an article about a search for the radish variety that made Long Beach famous; MS Extension Horticulturist Gary Bachman determined that the ‘Cincinnati Market Radish’ is the likeliest candidate. Not too surprisingly, after I read that article last spring, when I was learning about the history of Long Beach, I ordered a packet of seeds for the Long Beach ‘Cincinnati Market’ radishes.

Other information gleaned from the old newspaper pages indicated that most of the truck farms and market gardens were on the north side of town. The soil there is more suited to farming than is the sand dune where my garden is located. However, my sandy yard has produced an abundance of radishes for us in our first year of gardening here.

I think I will be able to harvest good radishes from the yard at least 8 months out of the year, possibly more. The problem months will be the hot ones, in summer.

  • Radishes from our garden
  • Radishes from our garden, the purple ones are ‘Malaga’
  • Radishes from our garden
  • One of Joe’s salads, featuring ‘Watermelon’ radish, garden arugula, a late tomato that ripened indoors, and sprouts from the kitchen
  • Winter radish, ‘Watermelon’

My copy of the Whole Seed Catalog from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds arrived today. The radish section is full of beautiful radish varieties. I will be re-ordering ‘Malaga’ radish seeds this year, because they are delicious and my current seed packet is almost empty, but I am going to hand the catalog to Joe to let him pick a couple more varieties to try.

Time for a Quick Crop of Radishes

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Plenty of gardeners in North Georgia wait until after mid-April to begin planting vegetable crops, but anyone who is a bit impatient can plant some radish seeds now.

Radishes from last spring’s gardening.   PHOTO/AmyGWh

Radishes grow best in the cooler weather of early spring, and they are ready to harvest just 4-5 weeks after they are planted. This makes radishes a great little crop to start the gardening year. Success comes so soon!

It used to be that most radish seeds in the garden centers and catalogues produced radishes that were just round and red.

Now, though, a whole range of colors and shapes are available, which makes pulling the little roots up at harvest time a great adventure. The same patch of garden that grew the pink and white (almost hidden under the pink) radishes in the picture also gave us purple, red, and yellow (!) radishes. All were delicious.

People who are Not From Around Here sometimes refer to radishes as a foolproof crop. I remember, when I first moved to Georgia, reading in more than one book/document, that “anyone can grow radishes.” That statement may be true in a sense, but the red-clay soil that is the base of my garden did not make a radish crop for the first couple of years, no matter how many seeds I set into the ground.

If your garden has been thwarting your radish-dreams, do not despair. The yearly addition of composts and other amendments, and having the soil tested to find out exactly what is needed to balance the nutrients for vegetable production, will soon enough bring plenty of these little beauties to your springtime table.

The Seven Kinds of Sweet Potato Amy Likes Best

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Does anyone else love the book “Harold and the Purple Crayon“? We must have read that book aloud to our kids — along with a couple hundred more of their favorites — about a thousand times. One of my favorite lines has always been about “the nine kinds of pie that Harold likes best.” When I was setting up my little sweet potatoes to start slips for planting in May, I was reminded of the pies.

I know that seven isn’t the same as nine, but it still seems like a lot. I had managed to save six half-gallon cartons for starting them in, but I had to rustle up one more long, shallow container at the last minute.

Five of Amy’s sweet potato varieties, making slips for planting in late May.

Two more sweet potato varieties making slips for this summer’s crop.

To be honest, I haven’t even tasted all of these yet, so I don’t know if they are my favorite in terms of flavor, but three were given to me by a sweet-potato-loving friend. We had met through the Extension office, when he was looking for a variety called Alabama Nugget. I told him about a place in Alabama that sells a pretty large assortment of sweet potato varieties, but mostly to small farms, so they are sold in bundles of 100.

My new friend is retired, so he just got in his truck, along with another friend, and they drove to the farm in Alabama. Since everyone involved loved sweet potatoes, it was easy to make more new friends, and the farmer and his (grown) son were very helpful.

My friend has been out to the farm in Alabama a few more times, and he has shared with me what he has learned along with some different sweet potato varieties that he is hoping will come close in flavor and texture to his favorite, but lost, Alabama Nugget.

Of course, Beauregard is one that most people know. It grows big and cooks up soft and sweet.

Purple Delight is much drier, almost like a dry Irish-type potato, and it is hardly sweet at all. It is a great addition to a mixed pan of roasted vegetables. The tubers grow almost straight down, and they are long enough that when a plant is harvested, if you get it up without breakage, it looks kind of like a purple octopus.

Porto Rican Gold is the heirloom from my friends Jack and Becky; it’s the one that Becky’s family grew commercially a hundred years ago in this county. The family has perpetuated the line all this time, but Jack and Becky are the last in their family to continue to grow it. I shared it with my new friend, so it would have a better chance of continuation.

The Annie Hall is paler fleshed, drier in texture than Beauregard, but with a different flavor. I like it a lot, but it is not a very productive variety. Last year I only had enough to eat two of them.

The others — Covington, Alabama Red, and Calvert/Cape Hatteras — are all new to me. I’m looking forward to growing them!

To start the slips, I have placed the tubers in a mixture of sand and compost that will be kept moist. There already are plenty of little sprouts showing, so I am hopeful that I will have enough to fill the garden. The sweet potatoes have one of the larger spaces in my yard’s rotation this year.

Anyone looking for more detailed growing information might try the Organic Gardening article “Sweet Potato Growing Guide.”

Elsewhere in the garden, other established crops are doing well. The long bed of allium family crops that were all planted last fall still looks good.

Multiplying onions, garlic, shallots.

The cilantro is making everyone happy. Joe loves it, I love it, my six pet bunnies love it!

Fall-planted cilantro is large and leafy in spring.

And of course, the lettuces are looking good and adding nice color to our meals. There had been radishes in the spaces between the lettuce plants originally, but we’ve eaten most of those. Luckily, I’ve started more here and there throughout the garden. We eat a lot of radishes. There were some thin slices on the sandwich I made for yesterday’s lunch.

Lettuce!

More lettuce! And inter-cropped radishes!

Hope that everyone else’s gardens are growing well!

Spring Harvest (!) and Soil Temperatures for Planting

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My first real harvest of spring-planted veggies:

Cilantro, Black-seeded Simpson lettuce, Purple Plum radishes  PHOTO/Amy W.

The garden hasn’t yielded much since January 1 — a last little bit of broccoli before the hard freezes, a few green onions, some carrots — so the lettuce, cilantro, and radishes that I harvested yesterday mark a turning point in the gardening year. They also made a great contribution to “taco night”!

As the spring crops mature to harvest stage, the planting for summer crops needs to begin. North Carolina State University has published a planting chart/calendar that includes soil temperatures to help us all work out the best order in which to plant our gardens. Gardeners who also have jobs, families, and other additional responsibilities don’t usually manage to get the garden planted all at once, and knowing which plants can do well in cooler soil temperatures can help gardeners decide what to plant first.

According to the chart, corn can be planted at soil temperatures as low as 50 degrees F, and so can pole beans, but squashes and tomatoes need a minimum soil temperature of 60 degrees F, peppers and cucumbers need 65 degrees F, and okra, melons, eggplants and Southern peas need a soil temperature of at least 70 degrees F to do their best.

For those of us in Cobb County who are planning to put seeds in the ground this coming weekend, taking a thermometer out to check on the soil temperature at a 4 inch depth at various points around the garden can help determine what to plant. In my yard, the soil temperature is approaching 60 degrees F, which means there is a lot I can plant now. It also means that I might need to replant those cucumber seeds that I put in the ground last week, when the soil temperature was a little lower.

A Walk Around the Yard

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Right now, the garden says that we have not yet had a hard frost, but that it’s been too cool for most of the warm-weather plants. A few Zinnias and my friend Electa’s Heirloom Pink Salvia are still blooming. The salvia re-seed all over the place, which mostly is fine because they attract lots of little pollinators.

This year’s carrot and radish bed.

The carrots and winter radishes (to the right of the carrots) won’t be too fussed about cold weather when it finally gets here, but both crops (and the rogue bok choy that somehow ended up in the same bed) have flourished in the warmth we’ve had so far.

I had hoped that last year’s carrot success wasn’t a once-in-a-lifetime event, and it looks as though the hope was not in vain. The carrot tops all look good, and the one carrot I pulled a few days ago (just to check on how things were going underground) was big enough that I think homegrown carrots will be part of our Thanksgiving dinner.

Winter radishes are getting big, a few at a time, and we have already been enjoying them as before-dinner snacks, sliced thin and lightly salted. They are our “healthy alternative” to the kinds of fried salty chips that come in bags at the store.

Ichi ki ke jiro persimmons

Broccoli patch

The broccoli is coming along, too. If I look straight down the center of each plant, I can see tiny heads beginning to form. At this point, it’s too soon to guess when they will be ready to bring in for dinner, but it may be before the end of the month.

Ichi ki ke jiro persimmons will start coming in soon, too. In theory, they are edible while still as hard as apples (like now), but we learned last year that the flavor improves if they have more time on the tree to get a little bit soft.

Marigolds

Marigolds are still in bloom, and I’ve been bringing in some of the old, dried flowers to save the seed. This is one of the French marigolds that is supposed to be good for reducing nematode populations in the soil, when planted in a solid block to grow for several weeks (at least). I never grow them that way because the nematode problem hasn’t been severe enough to warrant giving up a planting bed for so long in summer, but I like to be ready, just in case.

Still some peppers, in November

When we had our big “freeze forecast” scare more than a week ago, I harvested all of the larger peppers. There were still some smaller peppers out on the plants, and the tinies are beginning to get bigger. If we have another week or so of sunny afternoons in the high 60s-to-low-70s (degrees Fahrenheit), I may be able to fill the dehydrator one last time.

The garden is saying, essentially, that all is as it should be.

Mostly Ready for Fall/Winter

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Most of the garden is ready for fall and winter (finally!). You’d think that by now I would know exactly what it’s going to take to get that all done, but I’m still a little surprised that there is so much work in clearing away the summer and making the start on fall and winter.

I cut down the buckwheat cover crop that has been growing in the top half of the beet and spinach bed to let it wilt down before turning it under, and I’ve planted a mixed cover crop of winter rye and Austrian winter peas in a couple of beds. Before those cover crops could go in, there was a general clearing-away of summer crops, then I brought compost out from the backyard compost pile, spread that on the beds, mixed it into the top few inches of soil, leveled the beds, then broadcast the seeds and “pounced” them in with a rake. The bed where the garlic and shallots will go in a couple of weeks has also been made ready.

Over the past ten-or-so days, I also replanted seeds for some of the lettuces, carrots, beets, spinach, and radishes, because the sweet potato bed isn’t the only one that has been chipmunked. The rascally rodents have been having way too much fun in my garden this year; somehow, they’ve gotten the impression that it’s their own little party place.

My neighbor across the creek has two outdoor cats, and I had thought that, between them, Lily and Johnny would have put a big dent in the chipmunk population, but they don’t seem to have been keeping up with the rate of reproduction. We don’t have as many hawks as usual, and that may be part of the problem. I think the crows (another nuisance) have been chasing them away. Next year, I may have to work at thinning some vegetation (daylilies, azaleas, and more) that has served as protective cover for the little, striped “party animals.”

Things have been busy at work. Last week, on Thursday, I was the guest on the Master Gardener Hour on America’s Web Radio. The show is scheduled to be posted on the 19th of October. On Friday, I talked about “Moving Toward Organics in the Vegetable Garden” for the Master Gardener Lunch & Learn series. Have I mentioned lately that I love my job?

Hope all the other gardens out there are just about ready for fall and winter!

Garden Update

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September peppers.

There haven’t been many photos in the blog lately, because I’ve had camera “issues.” At this point, those issues are mostly resolved, so I finally went outside in daylight to take some pictures for a simple garden update.

The summer crop that is still coming in strong is the peppers. All varieties across the whole bed are doing well. The tomatoes, even the ones planted latest, are mostly limping along. I’m bringing in a few tomatoes each week, but not great piles of them like I would normally be harvesting in September.

Buckwheat cover crop, ready to be mowed down.

The buckwheat that was planted across the top of the spinach-beet bed is doing great. Soon, I will be mowing that down (or Joe will, with the weed-whacker), then turning it under to get the space ready for a winter cover crop.

Some animal(s) out in the yard have been treating the rows of spinach and beet seedlings like a personal snack bar, and I may, as a result, end up reseeding all those rows. This is an annoying turn of events, but not a total surprise. A creek borders our yard on one side, which means we have plenty of drop-in “guests” of the four-legged, furry persuasion. The creek is like a natural highway that connects parks and fields in the area. My yard is just a scenic-turnout that happens to also include a couple of fast-food establishments.

Cabbage-family snacks for rabbits.

 The cabbage and broccoli plants have established nicely and have begun to really grow, but the little green stick front-and-center of the photo to the left is the remains of another animal snack — kind of like a broccoli-sicle stick instead of a popsicle stick.

However, I have another nine-pack of broccoli to plant, and it is enough to replace all of the most severely munched plants, with some left to plant further down the bed.

Healthy horseradish.

The horseradish, that we don’t even really like to eat, is looking pretty amazing. The friend who gave me the chunk of root with which to start my plant said that the flowers would be lovely, but I haven’t seen any flowers yet. I’ve had the plant for at least three years, so I’m thinking that I might not get to see flowers.

The plant is getting too big for its pot, and I’m expecting to re-pot it this coming spring, dividing the root to share and to make some horseradish sauce. Maybe I’ll find a recipe for sauce that we like!

This year, most of my plants were in the ground, but I have seen horseradish so healthy that it threatened to take over whole yards. Mine is going to stay in a pot.

Over in the side yard, the sweet potato vines seem to be contemplating some kind of take-over. They have flowed into the next bed and across the newly-laid centipede-&-nutsedge sod that the water department put down after replacing the neighborhood water mains.

This year’s sweet-potato glacier, slowly creeping across the yard.

In the picture to the right, a few okra plants can be seen along the left of the photo; they are holding their own among the vines and producing just enough okra for us to include some in a meal every few days.

It will be time to dig up those sweet potatoes very soon. I’m planning to manage that sometime in the first week of October. The slips were planted back in May, which means the plants have had PLENTY of time to make sweets for me by now.

Carrots to the left, winter radishes to the right.

The carrot and winter radish bed looks pretty good. There are still some places in the rows where carrots didn’t come up, and it isn’t too late to drop in a few seeds in those gaps. We are getting rain today, so it will have to be on another day, but I am thinking that there is still time for a few very late carrots.

The last seeds in won’t yield mature carrots until sometime in the spring, but that’s okay. I will have harvested plenty of other carrots by then, from the earlier-planted seeds.

Hope everyone else’s gardens are doing well!

Fall Planting, Continued

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I’ve made more progress in getting the fall crops planted, but I am beginning to fall behind. It’s almost mid-September!

Last Saturday morning, I planted 102 cabbage-family plants out at the little farm on Dallas Highway where I volunteer. Joe was out of town, and most of the rest of the volunteers had been busy on the tractors the day before. That left just me to prepare the beds, space the transplants, make the holes, set in the little plants, water, then give each plant a shot of fish-emulsion as starter fertilizer. Can I just mention here that I was pretty tired after that long morning? 

In my own yard, I worked on clearing away the parching corn and preparing that space for planting. Then yesterday after work I managed to get my cabbages and broccoli in the ground.  Rabbits had eaten the tops off of most of the little plants that I had started from seed  — I had set the tray of plants out in the yard, where the seedlings would get plenty of sunshine — which means that about 3/4 of those plants in my garden now are from a garden center. This morning, though, they all still look good.

The carrots, winter radishes, beets, spinach, and patch of buckwheat (as a cover crop) that were planted earlier are up and growing. There are a few gaps here and there in the rows of vegetables where I will need to put in a little more seed, but not many.  The long stretch of rain that we had this year has made it seem weird to have to water the seedlings, but that’s what I’ve had to do — stand out in the yard with a hose to make sure the little seedlings don’t dry up and blow away.

I still need to get the lettuce (and other various) seedlings into the ground, and I have some other seeds to plant. If all goes well, I’ll manage to finish it all sometime this coming weekend.

Meanwhile, the patch of green beans that I planted in early July is providing plenty of beans, there are still peppers and tomatoes coming in, the eggplants look as though they are putting on a new flush of flowers, the sweet potato vines are sprawled all over the place, and just looking at all that exuberant growth makes me smile.

Hope everyone else’s fall planting is on track!

I Planted Carrots

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This was a busy weekend of tidying up, amending, and planting. The bed that got “tidied” (everything pulled out) was the one that had held the zucchini and most of the cucumbers. After pulling up the old plants, I spread a wheelbarrow load of compost over the bed and then used my grub hoe to “till” the bed. If the bed hadn’t been for carrots, I probably wouldn’t have worked it so deeply, but I wanted the roots to have no trouble growing long and straight.

After raking the bed smooth, I added a little of my own mix of organic amendments, then sifted those into the top few inches of soil before planting.

One of the great things about planting the carrots is that I get to use my seeder. Most of my crops aren’t planted directly into the garden as seeds so solidly in the beds, but carrots are. It’s always fun to roll that seeder down the row, and great to know that the seeds are planted with pretty good spacing at the depth that I want, covered up and tamped down, all in one pass!

Grub hoe and seeder help make short work of planting the carrots. PHOTO/atlantaveggies@blogspot.com

I planted five rows of carrots and then one row of winter radishes.

The day wasn’t super hot — only in the 80s — but it was humid and still, so in the mid-afteroon — rather than working out in the blazing hot sun — I worked on the shady front porch on transplants for the beds that aren’t far enough along to clear for fall planting.  I started a tray of fall greens and bumped up my cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower seedlings into larger pots.

Meanwhile, the summer crops are coming in at a good pace. I’m especially happy about the success of the peppers. We’ve been putting a couple of pounds of them, chopped, into the dehydrator each week for awhile now, and they will make our winter meals very tasty.

A day’s August harvest in a rainy garden year.  PHOTO/atlantaveggies.blogspot.com

Hope everyone else’s gardens are doing well!