JAPANESE MINOWASE DIAKON RADISH PROPAGATION

A radish variety with a classic taste and exceptional quality The Japanese minowase is one vegetable you must try growing in your garden So just like other radish varieties we recommend that you sow radish seeds directly in the soil and although radish is a cool season crop in places like California where the weather is pretty much moderate throughout the year you can grow radish year-round We're growing our radish in raised beds here so we need to make sure that this soil that we're using for our radish is pretty loose and contains some kind of porous material like perlite which we have used here if you're growing radish in the ground make sure that you dig at least 6 inches below the soil surface so that the soil is nice and loose make sure you add a lot of organic material like compost which will improve the texture of your soil the Japanese minowase radish sends out these big roots that develops into big radishes so you want to make sure that the soil is loose enough for the plants to send out these roots into the soil and this is what well give you large harvests of radish [music] so it takes about 10 days for the seedlings to emerge and once the seedlings have emerged you need to make sure that that you thin the radish seedlings to one plant per spot. To do that just remove the plant that's not so healthy and you should be left with one plant in one spot. Now what I'm doing here is that that I'm providing a little bit of support to some of these radish seedlings that have fallen over and as the seedlings grow, they will become stronger and they will start sending out their roots deeper into the soil so this is just a temporary measure by which you can make sure that the seedlings are supported well you can do this for all the seedlings and if you're growing in rows, doing this is a lot easier and this is also a good time: to start thinking about adding fertilizer water soluble fertilizers every two weeks or if you prefer to use slow release fertilizers you can add them now the seedlings will require some kind of nutrition to start growing and for these plants I've used fish and seaweed fertilizer which is one of my favorite fertilizers to use and I've been using it every two weeks till the plants are well established So after 45 days you can see that the plants now look pretty healthy and they've started growing bigger and you can see that the spacing that we started off with now actually look smaller the plants will get bigger and bigger and you will see that it'll start getting crowded around the plants now but this is okay because radishes can grow quite close together and 76 days after planting you can now start harvesting your radish and as you can see here this radish is pretty big, pretty stout and has a great pungent flavor so all in all this is a great radish variety to grow now I grow radishes not only for their roots but also their Greens so I make sure that while the radish has grown to about this size I do add a high Nitrogen fertilizer like blood meal which causes a lot of greens to grow now if you're growing radish for just the roots then you should stop adding fertilizer once the plants are established what this will do is it will force the plants to concentrated its energy on building the roots while not producing a lot of greens however if you've not tried radish greens I would highly recommend that you do try it out it tastes absolutely delicious you can eat it cooked it's got a nice pungent flavor to it I usually boil the leaves and then mix it with lentils and prepare it with a lot of other vegetables as well and it tastes really nice [music] snails and slugs do feed on the leaves of this radish plant however other than that I did not see any other insects that caused any damage to this Japanese minowase radish plant and I also wanted to talk a little bit about the taste of the this radish the Japanese minowase radish is one of the more pungent varieties of radish that you can grow and eat. So it does have the classic radish flavor the pungent flavor that you would expect from radish and is definitely not a mild variety so if you like pungent radish you will love this radish variety and it also grows into a pretty big roots so the amount of radish that you get for the space that you use is pretty good you can get a lot of radish from just a small area And the Japanese minowase radish is also called the daikon radish however i've seen that the diakon is a special variety that grows really huge roots so this minowase radish is a little bit different from the diakon varieties although the minowase is is also called the diakon by some folks we had an unusually hot January this year so you can see that this radish plant has sent out some flowers and this is a sign that the plan has gone to bolt which means that it will not produce roots anymore but flowers and seeds will be produced