S2 Episode 10 Kathy’s Radishes
Sometimes you read a recipe and think, hmm that sounds nice, must try that sometime. Sometimes you read a recipe and think - I need to go and get those ingredients NOW and cook it TONIGHT! The latter was the reaction I had the first time I read Kathy Slack’s substack which is called Tales from the Veg Patch. Her passion for food and talent for creating recipes just shone through and was infectious. She has written a cook book called From the Veg Patch which you can see here. I had come across her work because I was on the search for a vegetable story, I really felt that there must be wonderful plant stories about vegetables in the same way as there are about trees and flowers.
Thank you to Kathy for sharing her radish story. The radish may be tiny but as you will hear in this story its power was rather mighty. It is not the first and I am sure it will not be the last time that we will hear about the magic of seeds and the power of nature to heal us when we most need healing.
When you google radish you do get some quite intriguing questions from is it ok to eat radishes everyday to why do I crave radishes. I am not going to pretend I know the answers to these questions but I am going to point you to a very delicious radish tarte Tatin recipe, recently published by Kathy on her Substack newsletter! Below is Kathy with her veg boxes earlier in Spring when I visited. These are my radish seedlings but a confession the real deal on the right are at the wonderful veg shop at the end of my road! However I am hopeful I will get enough of a crop to make Kathy’s recipe.
If you are a regular listener to the podcast you may recall Lally Snow who was in the Mint episode in series 1, talking about those who garden in a war situation, her first book was called War Gardens. Lally had been to Ukraine and was in conversation with Anya whose family live in Kiev. This month Lally’s second book is published. It is called ‘My Family and Other Seedlings - A Year on a Dorset Allotment’. It weaves together the history of allotments in the UK with her experiences of acquiring such an allotment, whilst looking after 3 children under 5. I thought it would be fun to bring Kathy and Lally together to share their experiences of growing and their shared philosophy of ‘just have a go’. This episode also touches on why people grow vegetables, do some grow to show, whilst others grow to cook?
When I recorded the episode Kathy wasn’t sure she wanted to grow on an allotment but she has just acquired Plot 8 in the village allotments and I am looking forward to reading about her progress in the coming year. Lally has moved house and now a bit further from her old plot has plans for her new garden. In Our Plant Stories, they share the ups and downs of growing!
I left Kathy’s garden enthused and stopped at a garden centre to purchase two packets of radish seeds. So for those of you who like me have never grown a radish, now is our chance and Kathy is our teacher.
How to Grow
“How to grow a radish. They only need about three inches of soil to grow in so you can grow them in a window box or an ice cream tub if you only want a few of them and you want soil about three inches deep and finely tilled if that makes sense so give it a rub around first so it's not got too many clumps in it. and then you take your radish seeds which are super tiny and you can do it in a couple of ways. If you are a stickler you'll want to do it in a drill which is just a line. I just scatter them. So scatter them roughly maybe a couple of centimetres apart but don't worry about it too much because you can thin them out and then pat them down onto the soil. You can cover them with a tiny dusting of very fine soil if you want, but technically they don't really even need that. But they need to be in contact with soil that is a bit damp. If your soil isn't damp when you start, when you water the soil you want to do it from underneath. So you want to sit the tray, for example, in a tray of water so it can soak up the water from underneath because they're such tiny seeds that if you water them from over the top they'll just all slosh about to the edge of your window box or whatever. And then you wait. That's it.”
How long?
“Four or five weeks. If it's in a window box that's quite sheltered you might find you need to water them maybe weekly if they don't get rain but otherwise that's it. Four or five weeks. Once they're anything above what marble size I would suppose, gobstopper size, then you can pick them but don't leave them too long because they can start to get quite woody, particularly if it gets hot. You can do this any time of year from about March to October I would say, but there'll be a period when it's very hot in the height of the summer where they might just bolt straight away which is when they send up a flowering so they kind of get too hot and they panic and they think I must leave a legacy and they send up a flowering stem so that they can seed and if that happens then the root that you want to eat will be really woody and not very tasty so pick them before that happens.”
Any particular varieties?
“Oh this is what I love about radishes there's so many varieties. So you can get mixers. I would avoid the mixed bags because you always end up with the white ones growing much better than the more interesting purple ones and the white ones aren't as tasty. But they all have hilarious names like French Breakfast. I have no idea why it's called French Breakfast. The French don't eat them for breakfast. They don't look anything like, it's a mystery. And then there's ones like Baby Belle and which are little pink ones but then there's long purple ones and there's white ones and then you can get into the winter radishes which are big, much bigger, like the size of a carrot and some of them are black and they're quite carrot shaped as well and I mean there's all sorts of places you can go with radishes.”
Any recipes for us?
Well when you've grown it yourself and you just the first thing you must do with the first ever radish you grow is just pluck it out of the soil dust it off and eat it that's your first recipe, nothing else, because it's so remarkable that you've done it. Then you can go a step further and do a radish slammer, which I love, which is like a tequila slammer but much better for you. So fresh radish, pot of salt, pot of butter, really soft butter. You like swish the radish through the butter so it's got a big dollop of butter on it and then you dunk it in the salt. and then you bite it and you get this lovely salty, fatty and then a peppery kick at the end and it's just delicious.”
“Then you can move on to cooking them. I cannot recommend cooking them enough. If you roast them whole with a bit of olive oil and that for maybe 10 minutes and then drizzle just a little bit of balsamic and another five minutes, pink, it's just a lovely colour. But then they'll also get a bit gnarly and a bit caramelised and the flavour's much less peppery. And that's lovely with, as a warm salad, maybe with some grains and some feta over it, maybe a bit of mint and that kind of thing. They're really versatile.”