I’ve been picking some rats tail radishes today. Unlike normal radishes which are grown for their edible roots, these are grown for their edible seed pods. All radish seed pods are edible apparently, but these have been bred to make them bigger!

They look a bit like bobbly chilis. They’re delicately flavoured for the first bite and slowly the heat builds on your tongue. They are a nice flavour though and probably not as hot as the red radish roots you’re used to. Although the redder cases are supposed to be mroe pungent!

I’m now looking for recipes to store them and suspect pickling them will work well.

They are amazingly easy to grow though and both rows have sprung up easily and have flowered like mad and are now forming tons of seed pods. These will take some serious picking too! So many pods on one stem – whereas normal radish it’s one seed for one root… these work out really well in terms of plant value. Offered some round on the allotment and people liked them and had not heard of them which is always nice!

Carrots and parsnips are coming up well still, we’ve nearly got some peas and our second lot of beans are still ok – we’ve had some terrible slug damage with those. The broad beans will need picking soon and I’m looking forward to that very much as I adore them!

Huge punnets of raspberrys have been picked all week and now we’re picking for jam! I’ve never made jam but feel obliged to do some this year.