Home Grown Radishes

We are now growing our own radishes!

Every year the chillies that we grow for use in our sauces are transplanted out into the polytunnel at around May. This gives us a few months in spring in which the space is free to be used as a nursery to raise our own crops ready to plant out into our garden.

Khoo's Hot Sauce - Polytunnel in Spring
The Polytunnel as a plant nursery in spring.

For the last two years we have noticed how fast our radishes grow in the polytunnel, and how little space they need.

I have been wondering for some time whether we could grow any more of our ingredients on site to further reduce our food miles and carbon footprint. I think radishes are the answer.
We use a lot of radishes in our Bajan hot sauce, so growing them in our polytunnel rather than buying them from the wholesalers would lower the carbon cost of this product significantly.
It also means we can avoid any nasty pesticides and fertilizers used in the commercial growing of crops, and grow the radishes in our own healthy soil, enriched with home made compost and locally sourced manure, so a win/win all round!

We have already successfully grown enough radishes for one batch of sauce, these were used in batch BN15.

Khoo's Hot Sauce - Home Grown Freshly Harvested Radishes
Freshly harvested radishes.

At this point I can’t guarantee that we will be using 100% home grown radishes in every batch, as it may take a while to perfect the the timings of seed sowing and harvesting, but we hope to have this mastered and use only our own radishes in every batch of Bajan hot sauce by the end of the year.

Khoo's Hot Sauce Home Grown Radishes
Topped and tailed and ready for the pot.