Rocking roots - the crimson and the white

For some year now I haven’t grown turnips because I’ve been under the impression that I’m the only person in the family that likes them. I think I was given a packet of Bianca Lodigiana turnips (a white variety from Lodi, south of Milan) from Franchi Seeds this year and sowed them in a rather offhand way in a spare bed at the beginning of the season. They repaid me for this neglect by coming up sweet and nutty, round and wonderfully unblemished, all at once of course thanks to my lack of successional sowing. 

It clearly pays to have the soil well-prepared. Turnips are a brassica (Brassica napus), so prefer slightly alkaline conditions in favour of acid. You can either lime the bed beforehand or if you think your soil ph is fairly neutral, use spent mushroom compost as manure. In any case, brassicas tend not to like freshly manured ground, so if you can use a bed which you manured the previous season, this should be ideal for them. In this case, the turnip bed had been used for sweetcorn, beans and squash grown in a three sisters formation, all greedy crops requiring plenty of organic matter. The seeds can be sown in March for a summer crop as I did, or continuously throughout the summer to provide roots through to late autumn and into winter.

Other tips for good turnips include not letting the growing plants dry out at any stage, or else they will become woody, and also being ruthless with thinning the crop at an early stage. I often find it difficult to pull out what look like perfectly healthy seedlings: psychologically it helps if I then eat the thinnings, in a salad, or used as green garnish. Then I feel as though I'm harvesting, rather than wasting good plants on the compost heap.

We picked and ate them when still young - about the size of a satsuma - and snowy white. They were delicately sweet with that slight mustardy tang, and were hugely popular with everyone. The most entrenched turnip sceptics were particularly won over by having the smaller ones glazed whole – cooked with butter and a little sugar as you would for glazed carrots.

Picked young, you also get the benefit of the tops, which can be cooked like spinach for a delicious fresh green. 

Another similar brassica, kohl rabi (Brassica oleracea), did well too. Last year I grew the variety Delicacy Purple, sown in March the same way as for the turnips, and which cropped from July to November from a single sowing – I was pleasantly surprised by how long the season lasted. I've always liked kohl rabi which to me taste like sweet broccoli stems - my favourite part of broccoli! The flesh of the swollen 'bulb' is a pale creamy-green colour, no matter what the colour of the skin.

In theory, kohl rabi can be prepared and eaten like turnips. In practice, mine usually end up in a salad, often with an oriental style hot, sweet dressing. I'm also happy to give them a perfunctory peeling and then munch on the kohl rabi as if it were an apple - and just as refreshing.

Keeping pests at bay

Garlic (Solent Wight) on the left, Egyptian walking onions behind, hopefully protecting the Chinese broccoli (kailans) and kohl rabi seedlings. The copper-lined collars prevent slugs and snails from reaching the brassica seedlings.

I planted out these heavily guarded brassica seedlings yesterday. Bitter experience has taught me that they need this level of protection. The copper-lined collars are made from sections of 500ml plastic water bottles trimmed with copper tape around the top and will deter slugs and snails. The metal reacts with the mollusc's mucus when it tries to cross the copper strip and gives it a shock-like sensation.


I've found these home-made copper rings perfectly effective and use them with brassica seedlings, cucurbit seedlings, lettuces, of course, and also globe artichokes when they are first planted out. I can still remember the heartbreak of coming home after an Easter weekend away and finding my globe artichokes, planted out on Maundy Thursday, had vanished. The only clues to their disappearance were a number of long, ribbon-like, shiny trails.


The only drawback really, apart from the need to have as many collars as you have seedlings in the ground at any one time, is that the slug/snail population isn't controlled. In a particularly sluggy year, they will go off to try to find something else to eat that's unprotected. One year I found slugs attacking the beetroot, which is not normally vulnerable. This year, with a wet April with showers interspersed with sunshine, we are on Code Red as far as slugs and snails are concerned.


The second level of protection here is the perimeter planting of various alliums. I have deliberately positioned garlic (pictured here is Solent Wight, with elephant garlic out of shot) and onions around the outside of the raised bed to deter cabbage whitefly. Alliums are often planted with carrots to deter carrot fly, as it is said that the onion smell confuses the carrot fly (and also that the reverse holds true, the carrot smell deters the onion fly who is after an allium snack). 


Here I am hoping that the same principle holds true against whitefly. If this mini-trial proves successful, and the kohl rabi and kailans in the raised bed remain relatively whitefly-free, I will extend it to the main brassica bed, where the cauliflower, broccoli and cavolo nero will be planted later in the summer. Last year, the cavolo nero in particular was horribly infested with whitefly to the point of not being able to harvest it.


Copper tape is available from larger garden centres and from a number of online gardening suppliers. It's well worth searching and shopping around as prices can vary widely. Copper rings are also available but tend to be much more expensive while performing exactly the same function as the homemade rings here. For a copper ring with a larger diameter cut sections from a 2l water bottle.

Clockwise from top left: cut an empty water bottle into sections; take the mid-section and line with copper tape, tucking the ends over the rim to make a neat edge.