Triumphant Turnips

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Fall turnips require steady, light moisture, but they need little, if any, supplemental fertilizer when planted where peas or beans grew during the summer. Sow your crop about six weeks before your first frost date, gradually thin the seedlings to 4 inches apart, and wait until a light frost sweetens the leaves before eating them.

Super Spring Turnips

Typically, spring turnip crops will be short-lived, because hot weather sharpens the leaves’ flavor, and longer days trigger early flowering. As spring turnips bolt, succulent green flower buds, known as raab, will be among your first tastes of spring. This is prime time for growing fast-maturing salad turnips such as ‘Hakurei’ (38 days, hybrid), or ‘White Egg’ (48 days, open pollinated), both of which produce great greens. Three weeks before your last spring frost date, plant the seeds about a quarter inch deep, and keep the bed moist until the seeds sprout. Plant turnips in rows or broadcast them over a bed. Either way, you’ll get a better crop of plump roots if you thin seedlings to 3 inches apart.

To enjoy the tender, thinned seedlings, simply braise them in olive oil with a few slivers of garlic and a light sprinkling of salt.

Turnips in Winter

Fall storage turnips can be left in the garden until the roots are 3 to 4 inches in diameter, or until the first hard freeze arrives. Although the plants easily survive repeated freezes, the texture of the roots suffers when they freeze and thaw repeatedly.

To store a bumper crop, pull up the roots, then use a sharp knife to cut off the tops. Without washing the roots or cutting off the taproot, lay the turnips in a box no more than two deep, and store them in a root cellar or other humid place where the temperature stays below 45 degrees. Turnips left in the ground through winter become too pithy to eat, but the edible green flower buds that emerge first thing in spring make keeping a few tattered plants under mulch or a plastic tunnel — or replanting slightly softened roots — a worthwhile project. Turnip buds have an assertive flavor, even when cooked, but they make a nice addition to tossed hot pasta flavored with garlic and olive oil, then topped with shavings of hard cheese.

Gather mature turnip seeds after the pods dry to tan and begin to crack open. When stored in a cool, dry place, turnip seeds stay viable for up to five years. Collected in early summer, the dark brown seeds will be raring to sprout when nights cool down first thing in the fall.

A Tasty Turnip Trio

Expand your fall menus with these three easy recipes.

Rosy Pickled Turnips

1 beet (3 inches in diameter) or a small can of beets
3½ cups hot water
7 tbsp pickling salt
1¼ cups white vinegar
4 turnips about 3 inches in diameter 
8 cloves garlic, peeled and halved

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