This year, I decided to try growing radishes.  Why, you ask?  Because, as a computer programmer, I like things to happen instantly.  Unfortunately, gardens don't grow instantly.  However, radishes grow in 30 days, which, in gardening terms, is a blink of an eye.

So I decided to grow a garden bed of radishes.  Therefore, I decided to do some radish research, and found out several amazing things about radishes.  The first thing I learned was that you can eat every part of every radish in every stage of life!  You can eat the root, you can eat the seedlings, you can eat the leaves, you can eat the flowers, and you can eat the seed pods.  Not only that, you can use the remains of the plant as food for other plants.

(Flowering Radishes)

So, here's what I did, and so far it's worked out really well:

1. I overplanted my bed - way overplanted
2. I thinned out the extra seedlings into a plastic dish (leaving plants about 2 inches apart), and used the seedlings as sandwich sprouts
3. I then harvested 3/4 of my radishes at harvest time, and kept both the leaves and the roots
4. I used the radish roots in salads and stir-frying, and I used the leaves in soups.  I'll post my recipe later, but it's really easy.  You could probably also use the leaves in a stir-fry, but wouldn't want to eat them raw.
5. I let the rest of my radishes go to seed.  However, I found out that radish plants get really, really tall - about 4 feet tall.  I added some supports, but even then most of them fell over.
6. I plucked the bean-looking pods from the radish plant, and - wow! - they had the texture of a green bean and the taste of a radish.  You can use them just about anywhere, and the radishes were absolutely loaded with these things.  I would guess that each plant had about 30 seed pods on them.  And, while it doesn't have quite as much taste, the root is still edible.
7. I planted the radishes about March 16, and it's now June 8th, so it was about 84 days. 

(Radish Seed Pods)

I think next year what I will do is, rather that just keeping the back row to go to seed, I'll just thin the radishes at the root stage from being a few inches apart to being a few feet apart. 

But, that's not all.  It turns out that radishes have one more trick up their sleeves.  Because they have such a long root, they can actually pull nutrients from way down underground to the surface.  So, you can use radishes as a "green manure".  Plant them about 2-3 weeks before the first frost, and let the winter freeze kill them.  They will bring nutrition from the sun and from below the soil to the top of the soil, then the winter freeze will kill them off, and they will nourish your soil over winter.  

They actually have specialized radishes for this (fodder radishes), but really, for the small home gardener, any kind can be used.  I imagine that the deep radish root will also be useful in breaking up clay soils.