Radishes fresh from the garden – my first harvest of the season! As an unexperienced gardener with limited square footage, I tried to be extra fancy by interplanting my radishes with my carrots. According to the Internet, the theory is that radishes, a fast-growing crop, will loosen the soil and be ready to harvest by the time the carrots start to make any real progress in their growth.

Things were all fine and dandy in the beginning and the radishes germinated within a few days then grew quickly as promised. Then holes began appearing in the leaves. Turns out slugs love radish leaves, so I sprinkled crushed eggshells around the row to try and deter them (the shells are supposed to be too sharp for their little tender mollusk bodies). That didn’t work well for me, but I wasn’t too concerned as I figured the radishes were going to be harvested fairly soon anyway.

Alas… Two days before my expected harvest date, I plucked a radish from the soil only to find that it had not developed a bulb! I thought my radish dreams were crushed. Logically, I wanted to give them more time in the ground to develop but was worried about jeopardising the carrots. I waited a week or so before pulling the radishes and lo and behold most of them were fine, albeit pretty teeny. The lack of bulb development might have been due to overcrowding, but who really knows. As far as I’m concerned, the radishes made a lovely colourful addition to our veggie tray and the bitter greens went great in stir fry. Crisis averted. I might throw a second sowing of radishes in somewhere as they’re just so dang fast, so perhaps I will be able to repent for my gardening sins the next time around.