My garden isn’t all that big when you consider that I would like to feed four people. My tendency is to want to plant some of everything. Because everything tastes best when picked directly before eating. If I plant a little bit of everything then I will harvest only a little bit of everything. Not enough to feed ourselves for more than a meal. I have a practical side that wants to get the most out of my work. So I have been planting things that grow well in our climate, have a high yield per space used, and can be trained to climb. Root vegetables take up too much real estate. One row of carrots takes awhile to mature and when it finally does we eat them within days. I can plant three tomato plants in the same amount of space and gather fruits throughout the summer. We will be eating a lot of cucumbers, squash, and tomatoes this year. I plant greens; lettuce, kale, and chard amongst the vining plants as they will mature just as the larger plants become big enough to shade them out. The past two weeks have been salad party weeks. Greens at every meal!
Radish have moved out of the frivolous zone and into the I can’t live without them room. Until this year I had not connected with radish. I grew them, for some reason, I always had a pack of seeds in my stash. But most years I forgot about them after sowing. They were too close together and grew spindly or bolted and tasted woody or the flea beetles got to them first. I definitely didn’t have a way of eating them that sustained my interest. An occasional snack with ranch dressing or eaten right out of the dirt while I was pulling weeds.
This year is different. The weather was unseasonably cold. Covid quarantine shut down the local compost source. Money for plants was tight. Our neighborhood farm set out a seed sharing box for people to take and give what they need. So cool. The farm was on the street we travel to walk home from school. One day there was a pack of radish seeds on the street, in the rain. We rescued it, thinking there was a small chance they were still viable. Fearing for future lack of food security I was desperate to get something in the ground, compost or not. So in went the radish seeds. The opposite of nonchalance is how I tended these babies. I was watering them diligently. Checking their spacing daily and pulling anything that got too close to it’s neighbor. I added the greens to my smoothies or wilted them with an egg on top. The flea beetles never showed. My radishes grew! We continued to harvest a few every day, round, succulent, crispy ones. When you only harvest a few a day it doesn’t constitute making an entire dish. You can put them in a salad, but without our garden grown lettuce the merits of the radish were drown out by old grocery store greens. How to eat a radish besides biting right into it that extols without diminishing every desirable quality of a fresh, plucked right out of the ground fruit of your labor?
You slice it thin
Lay the gorgeous slivers on a plate so that they are not overlapping
Lightly sprinkle with sea salt
Drizzle or plop ghee all over, making sure each radish gets it’s fair share(butter works too, and maybe olive oil)
Eat with your fingers, one at a time, dragging the radish slice through the ghee when necessary
Taste all the flavors. Salt, fat, heat. Crunchy Salty Fatty Goodness
Wipe your chin and check your shirt for grease stains
And then make sure you plant some more because this snack is too good to be done with so quickly. Maybe keep the seeds by the door and every time you harvest a radish you also plant a radish. Don’t buy chips anymore. This will cover that craving and doesn’t require any packaging or cooking. Science says that radish are good for your immune system. I feel like I’m the queen of the universe when I eat them, that’s likely to be good for my immunity.
(I’m going to go pick a radish now and try it with olive oil)
