Thursday, July 27, 2023

Not A Failure, But Far From Success

Daikon radish is supposed to, if you believe the literature, mature in 2 months. It's been over 2 months now, and my patch looks like this.

It's leafy and green, but that's kind of the end of the good news.

Only the strip down the middle seemed to grow at a decent rate, the stuff around the edges is still quite small. Given that the sunniest spot corresponds to the best growth, I'd say that overall this patch didn't have enough light for these plants, and if I wanted a proper crop I'd have to set up a patch in full sun.

A few radishes did form some decent looking taproots.

But only maybe 4 or 5 out of the whole plot, and even then they're pretty tiny compared to what daikon is supposed to look like.

Mostly the rest of them look like this.

I have a hard time even calling this a taproot.

I might try pulling one or two out of the ground to taste, but there's not really much here to get excited about on that front. That said, the main goal here was to fix some nitrogen in the soil and try to break up the clay a bit with organic matter, and to that end the seeds I bought were ones marketed for that purpose rather than being a cultivar specifically aimed at producing a food-grade crop. I was planning from the start to just leave these in the ground to decompose and enrich the soil.

Anyway, a lot of the plants are going to seed now which basically signals the end of their growth, so it's not like much is going to improve just by waiting longer.

It was a useful experiment at least.

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