A Radish By Any Other Name Would Taste As Peppery

The humble radish. Probably not a very common opening sentence to a blogpost. You might be hard pressed to find another recent post anywhere in the blogosphere that attempts to deal with the theme of the Radish. It’s only skipped briefly over even on websites devoted to vegetable horticulture. The radishes grown at Pilsdon have certainly been overlooked by those tasked with feeding the community, with the unfortunate result that they have just grown bigger and bigger, the largest ones now threatening to topple and crash onto our manor house, utterly destroying it and everyone within.

Now some claim to enjoy nothing better than crunching into a firm Raphanus sativus, as the botanists amongst you no doubt refer to it, and savouring its peppery goodness whole and unadulterated. I don’t count myself amongst their number and have been known to pick through a green salad leaving a small pile of pink-rimmed white discs at the side of my plate. It is quite hard to think of other uses for a radish, culinary or otherwise. Given that it has been some months since salads were considered a suitable dish to serve up at Pilsdon, it’s understandable that they have mostly been left to their own devices in the ground. 

However a couple of weeks ago I took it upon myself as Garden Monitor to promote the radish as a suitable ingredient for the kitchen, if only to try to clear the patch of soil ready for the onion planting later in spring. Alphonso and I were both rota’ed to make lunch and we had decided upon a hearty soup so I made the suggestion of whacking a couple of small radishes in, chopped up nice and fine to avoid detection. Alphonso’s distrust of the radish is of a similar ilk to mine but I managed to convince him that it was for the common good and so we proceeded to choose two, a long white tubular one and a small pink spherical one. Variety is the spice of life even when it comes to radishes. Given the quantity of soup we had to make to feed 25 people, those two radishes thankfully failed to make their presence known to our taste buds. 

Alphonso made another soup for lunch today during which he disclosed that it had again been made using the Pilsdon radish, and again we agreed did not taste in any way disagreeable. Our opinion of the vegetable is beginning to turn. However, our collective creative culinary powers will be tested to their utmost soon since, as I am reliably informed by a resident with a lifetime’s experience in growing things, the radishes now all need to come out or they will be turned to mush by the frosts. So we have to expect some unusual side dishes with our meals for a while. Sauteed radish anyone?

Thankfully the garden is big enough for many other foodstuffs and so we have already begun to sow seeds in trays for our electrically-heated germination cabinet. Peas, cabbages and tomatoes are all beginning to find their way in life. 50kg of seed potatoes arrived last week which are now being chitted in various rooms about the place.  We’re gearing up for another full-on growing season. The plans are made for where and when we’ll be planting everything, though the precise timing will depend on what our crazy weather system decides to throw at us this year. 

On a more technological note Pilsdon’s whizzy new website is revealed later today complete with Twitter feed and everything. Find it here and be amazed, humbled and informed.