The weather finally cooled off a bit and it’s time to work on the fall garden.
On Saturday I cleared a space in the Grocery Row Garden and planted some White Egg turnips. You can see the video here. It’s like clearing garden plots in a tropical forest!
When we first started growing turnips, we planted Purple Top. That variety is your classic turnip and it produced wonderfully for us. Too wonderfully. We quickly tired of eating them, and yet they kept coming in.
The tops were great as a cooked green, but the flavor of the roots is very… turnipy.
When we moved to Alabama six years ago, we decided to plant turnips again in the fall of 2020. That time, a local recommended we try “White Egg” turnips because they were milder and sweeter than the old Purple Tops. So we planted some, along with a variety called “White Lady,” and we found both of those to be sweeter and tastier than the Purple Tops.
White Lady produces faster than White Egg, but it’s not an heirloom – it’s a hybrid. White Egg is open pollinated, which also makes the seeds much cheaper.
Purple Top beats both of them on greens production, however, so if you want lots of greens and don’t care about getting a sweeter root, that’s a good choice. The seeds are also cheap in bulk. Sometimes they’re even planted in deer food plots!
Every variety we’ve planted has been very easy to grow, so if you want a root that just produces without much work, try turnips. Pro-tip: cook them with smoked ham hocks.
We’ll be adding more fall crops to the Grocery Row Gardens, including daikons, multiplier onions and rutabagas. We’ll try to get some new YouTube videos up as well, now that we can go outside without roasting alive.
…and the White Egg turnips I planted in that video are already up!
We’ll plant some White Lady and Just Right in the Grocery Rows as well, so we can taste-test them all side by side.
