Radish have delicate white flowers. This one’s petals have pink blush tips. But by the time a radish blooms it can be a huge plant and hardly edible.
I let one go and pulled it out of the garden yesterday. Huge! Hundreds of blossoms. It would have produced thousands of seeds.
But I wanted the space the radish took up to plant some fall crops. A huge radish bush with hundreds of blossoms is a treat for the chickens. It must have been a host to many insects, too small for me to see, but not too small for them.
Summer has past. Labor Day often heralds the start of the rainy season here. We had a few sprinkles yesterday evening, but the sun is out today and the forecast is for dry weather for the next week. The heat is gone and the days are more fall like than summer.
And what of the radish? It’s turned into a gnarly root. I’m sure it is chock full of fiber but it would be like chewing on wood. When you think about it, the radishes you see in beautiful bunches in the market are but babies plucked out of the soft soil. Little babies who will never experience their true destiny of becoming a bush with hundreds of butterfly like blossoms.
Blackberries are in peak picking condition. I like to pick them in the late afternoon when they are warm from being in the sun all day. It’s like eating warm blackberry pie fresh out of the oven.
And the spaghetti squash seeds I tossed on composting Alpaca droppings have turned into a jungle of green vines and lovely yellow flowers. There’s still time for the spaghetti squash to ripen before frost arrives in a month or so and puts an end to their vigor.