Radish

It's time to plant radishes in the garden and in the fields to improve soil health and control weeds.  Using the small grass box on a drill at 5-6 lbs per acre, use alfalfa setting as a guide to set seeding rate. A large seed box can be used but the setting is very low and somewhat difficult to establish. Use alfalfa as comparable seed on drill charts, reducing by 10%. It's important to calibrate your drill to determine correct seeding rate.

Remember radish is about 30,000 seeds per pound where wheat is closer to 10,000 seeds per pound.  It makes sense to plant a grass seed with radish as the two different crops work well together.  50 lbs of rye or wheat or oats and 5 lbs of radish makes a very nice mix.

Broadcasting (High Boy) / Aerial Seeding (8-10 lbs/acre): Strive for good soil and moisture contact (If fields are moist, fly seeds on. If fields are dry, push seeds in)

• Standing corn seeding indicator is when 1" patches of sunlight on soil surface are seen or approximately 4 weeks prior to anticipated harvest time
• Standing soybean seeding indicator is at leaf yellowing, prior to leaf drop
• Cotton seeding indicator is right before defoliation
• Improve success rate by using drop tubes when seeding with a high clearance cover crop seeder.

Precision Planter (4 lbs/acre): 15" rows using 60-cell small milo or sugar beet plate with 4" in-row spacing. Seed is selected for Precision Planting performance.

Nitrogen: To reach peak potential, needs 40-60 lbs of N, residual or applied.

Planting: For best results, plant in late summer to early fall, at least 3 weeks (typically 30-60 days) prior to the first average killing frost. Green growth starts in less than a week in normal conditions; radish size depends on growth time, length of sunlight, plant competition and available nutrients to scavenge. Tillage Radish® is a broad leaf plant. Consider this when planning your herbicide program.

Planting Depth: 1/4 to 1/2 inch deep. Can be planted 1" in light soils if necessary to reach moisture. When using a high clearance seeder, germination rate will be improved by using drop tubes to improve seed-soil contact.

Seeding Rate:

• Drilling: 6 lbs/acre
• Broadcast / Aerial: 8-10 lbs/acre
• Precision Planting (15" with 4" in-row): 4 lbs/acre

Control: Tillage Radish® winterkills with 3 consecutive nights in the mid-teens. If no winterkill, control with mowing, grazing or burndown of one quart of glyphosate with one pint of 2,4-D equivalent at flowering..

I have great interest into why radish works so well on my farm, in my state and across the nation and around the world.  This piece gives us another clue.

If you would like the entire article, send me an email and I would be happy to forward it to you.

I like to start sowing radish here by the end of June, after the summer solstice has occurred.  They tend to not bolt so quickly compared to sowing them sooner and tend to put on more root mass for me.

Radish is an important part of my soil improvement program.  Every gardener can quickly learn the benefits of radish by sowing them between the sweet corn rows and have a nice stand when the last ears are picked and the stalks are mowed down over the growing cover.  Oats and radish make a very nice cover crop to learn with here in the north where both will be dead without herbicide by planting time the next spring.

Ed Winkle