The Humble Radish
Commercially Nonviable, Yet Eminently Practical
by Gowan Batist
In the early spring the rain comes in heavy battering waves. On the coast it was hard to tell where the sea ended and our salty wind-whipped garden began. In the spring, the last of the garlic is sprouting, the potatoes are shriveled, the winter squash is diminishing, and the jars are leaving the cupboard. A handful of beans and some bones thrown in a pot with dried herbs is a regular dinner.
Then comes the radish. They add a fresh crunch to a winter diet that can otherwise be very homogeneous in color and texture. The first radishes taste of rain and crunchy sulfur burn, a nose-crinkling sensation and a rush of hydration on the tongue. Pulled out of the ground, they’re often decorated around the shoulders with the round shallow bite marks of snails, who slide across the garden in the early spring, their shining trails of slime disappearing into the general wet.
When I worked as a farm hand up north during college summers, I harvested radishes in the early mornings. The rows were 500 feet long, stretching so far the end would be invisible in the dim morning light and mist of the Pacific Northwest, imbuing a mythic, almost Sisyphean sense of futility to the work. Those radishes were not decorated with the round white marks of snails that made the red globes look like spotted cartoon mushrooms, but instead with the mica flecks of iron phosphate, an organic approved substance that repels and kills the kind of soft bodied creatures that mar the radishes. The flecks looked like gold glitter, but felt like tiny shards of glass if they made their way into my gloves.
The radishes can’t have been worth the cost of the amendment. The old man who owned the farm, operated by his son and grandson, ruled the farmstand with a grip that allowed no space for current market realities, costs of doing business, comparisons with peers, or the evidence of a balance sheet. He believed that people came to a farm stand for a deal, and expected to pay much less for produce than the grocery store. In a way he came from the same school of thought as my grandparents, who treated home-raised food as essentially free, and anything purchased as a luxury item. He lacked, however, my grandfather’s enthusiasm for every new agricultural development I brought to his attention, his favorite being the solar electric fence. This old man believed that wisdom was dispensed from the past to the future via a one-way valve, and treated any attempt at flow reversal as a plumbing emergency.
When I worked on his farm in 2011, a bunch of radishes from who-knows-where were sold for $1.20 at the Safeway near my bus stop. He sold them at farmstand for $0.30 per bunch, and tolerated no imperfect red globes, no cracks, no yellow clinging cotyledons. Radishes are one of the only crops other than baby greens that grow fast enough that they might still have those first emerging leaves clinging to them, but we sprayed them away with a high powered hose, under his fastidious gaze.
Harvesting the radishes was brutal work. Down on the ground, with wet knees that every pebble ground into, we would scoop a bunch per hand, alternating hands as we went down the row. I only had a moment to glance at every handful and flick away any split, tiny, or misshapen radishes before a band went around them and they were tossed into a crate. Once the truck was filled with crates they would be driven up the muddy lanes to the farmstand, which perched along a busy road on the outskirts of the city, and aggressively sprayed down. Inevitably this process would damage some leaves, which unlike the roots bruise easily and don’t store well. Any bunches with wilted leaves at the end of a busy farm stand day would be tossed, each gesture a firm rebuke, into a compost bucket by the old farmer, increasing the feeling of futility the next morning spent racing the sun to harvest more.
Those experiences were part of the mental classification system I developed for evaluating crops. A crop that only yields one harvest per planting, that you have to kneel all the way down on the ground to harvest, that is vulnerable to both weeds and pests, that doesn’t hold up well in a retail display, AND sells for a low market price ... ranks bottom tier across the board. This position of dishonor is occupied by the humble radish.
After experiencing all the physical pain and domestic strife a radish was capable of causing, and the small amount of money they were able to make, when I left that job and moved home to the Mendocino coast, I was sure I wouldn’t grow radishes. I didn’t stick to that plan for very long.
Radishes, for all their commercial faults at scale, are incredible for the small garden, and especially for the farm to school experience. I was managing Noyo Food Forest in my first years back in Mendocino, and I knew that radishes were a crop that a student could see, from seed to harvest, within the scope of a lesson plan. I could also be sure the cafeteria would always take the radishes for their salads. In that new context, radishes made sense, and I forgave them their downsides and embraced their peppery potential.
It wasn’t always smooth. I once spent fifteen minutes deliberately showing a volunteer the difference between the fat lobed radish leaves and the lacier, more hirsute wild radish weeds, and with a solemn nod she agreed she could “weed the radishes.” When I returned from a group of students, she sure had. All the baby radishes, no bigger than dimes, lay in a pile on the ground, carefully differentiated from everything that wasn’t a radish, which remained in the ground.
Radishes are a cold season crop, but here on the coast, that’s all year. I soon overproduced them, and, inspired by my mother, learned to drag them through soft butter, sprinkle them with the coarse sea salt we made ourselves, and pop them whole into my mouth. Another brainwave she had was roasting them whole with a little honey. The sugars caramelized and softened in the oven, the spice mellowed to a warm interesting note that separated the radish from a roast turnip, to which it was otherwise identical.
My favorite way to eat radishes is pickled, with sliced carrots, onions, and jalapeños, a combination I was turned on to by the taco trucks I visited in college. I have jars of this mix, homemade from our garden and the MendoLake Food Hub farmers, in my pantry right now. Their fresh, spicy, and acidic crunch is the perfect complement to a rich dish that needs the levity. I like to go bite-for-bite between a burrito and the pickled veggies.
I’ve grown well over a dozen varieties over the years, and my favorites are still the humble cherry belle, a plain red variety that stays sweet and resists pithiness, and purple plum, a beautifully shaped and colorful radish (more lavender than plum, really) with unusually strong leaves and a mellow flavor.
In the pasture, I’ve also come to embrace the virtues of radishes. We’ve grown daikon radish three feet long as part of a multi-stage process of managing invasive species. After gorse removal, the ground is exposed and unstable and needs a cover crop to muscle out the aggressive weedy species. The more diverse the mix, the better it is. We plant a mix that includes grasses for carbon, legumes for nitrogen and pollinators, and daikons for their amazing ability to add organic material to the soil. When the sheep graze the cover crop mix, they bite the radishes off at ground level, leaving round white dots the size of a golf ball speckled all around the ground, their surfaces grooved with the marks of their teeth. Post grazing, it looks like an untidy driving range. Once the sheep move on, the root left below ground rots and breaks down, and the space it once occupied provides valuable aeration.
It is a truth of capitalism that some of the plants that seem the most eager to work with us, and produce the most generously, end up being valued the least. Without the market as a factor, everyone would revere a plant that gives and gives and gives, but if you’ve ever sold zucchini in August, you know that practical utility rarely translates into financial windfalls. These crops will keep you alive, though, and will reward the beginner, the distracted parent, the disabled gardener, the gardener with little space, and the parents guiding their child’s clumsy fingers to press their first seeds into the soil.
All of that generosity and reliability gets overlooked in an economic environment that values the rare and unobtainable. The zucchini, the potato, and the humble radish are never going to be status symbols. They don’t offer us prestige, just a little thing called survival. Only what keeps body and soul together. Just the stuff of life. As someone who has run a vegetable farm ostensibly for profit, these “easy” crops weren’t at the top of my list. But in the first year of our child’s life, exhausted and physically reeling and adrift as we were, even the likes of us could make potato and kale soup from our garden. We could grill zucchini, and we could make an arugula salad. Radishes are still easy when life isn’t.
As a laborer, I resented radishes; as a business owner, I disparaged their profit margin; but as an eater coming out of a long winter of soft, starchy stored food, I have pulled their glowing roots into the low light, washed them in the rain that gathered in my palm, and crushed them between my teeth as a sign that spring really is here. As a teacher, I have watched children experience their short life cycle with wonder, and as a parent, I will soon accompany my own child on that journey.
As long as it matters that people need to eat, profitable or not, radishes will matter. Their cheerful roots popping up out of the ground, begging to hop into your crate only to nip your tongue, will always embody to me the dynamic complexity of spring on the north coast.
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist following sheep around the skeleton of a boom town. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed with a baby on her back, propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or meal prepping baby food with local bulk food via the MendoLake Food Hub.
Radish photo by Daiga Ellaby courtesy of Unsplash.