Roots & tubers
Salad turnips (Hakurei)
Fast and sweet.
- Outside
- Direct early Apr, again mid Aug
- Where
- Raised bed or grow bag
- Sun
- Full sun
- Water
- Often; crisp and mild depend on never drying out
- Harvest
- May to Jun, then Sep to Oct, golf ball size
Hakurei salad turnips are white, apple-crisp, and sweet enough to eat like fruit, five weeks after an April or August sowing. They repay less patience than anything else this good.
Growing
Direct sow in early April and again in mid August, thin to three inches, and keep the bed damp; these are roots grown at a sprint, and the sprint runs on water. Pull at golf ball size from May, then again in fall, when cool weather makes the sweetest roots of the year. Heat turns them sharp and pithy, so the two windows are the whole season.
Varieties
Hakurei is the variety that made the type famous, and there is little reason to stray; White Lady is the acceptable understudy.
Pests
Netting from sowing day is the plan here, since flea beetles chew the tops and cabbage root maggot tunnels the root itself, the one wound that actually matters. Covered rows come up flawless.
In the kitchen
Eaten raw with salt, halved into salads, or glazed whole in butter with the greens wilted in at the end. Peeling is unnecessary and slightly insulting.