In-house training/Stuff on my garden plot: Cincinnati Market Radishes
Since my last posting on here, I've been busy wrapping up the end of the semester and then taking training classes through Madison Area Technical College. At the Tech Academy, I learned how to run the Telepresence classroom that I'll use for one section this fall, and at the week-long Learning Academy, I took a class on educational evaluation as part of the certification requirements for WI technical college instructors. At these classes, I especially like meeting teachers from other departments/programs and picking up teaching ideas from them.

Cincinnati Market Radishes

In my plot at the Sheboygan Community Garden, I'm trying a less common radish called Cincinnati Market, which is dark red and long like a typical carrot. According to the Seed Savers Exchange catalog description, the length can be about 6 inches; however, mine tend to be shorter--about three to five inches. Mine also taste a little hotter or spicier than typical radishes rather than mild. That could be because of our warm spell earlier this month. I actually don't like radishes that much unless they're really mild. [In the future I'll say more about other less common things I'm growing.]

Last Saturday at the Dane County Farmers' Market, I came across a vendor selling radishes that looked similar, but she called them by a Japanese name. So I decided to do some research and found that old seed catalogs scanned into Google books often listed Cincinnati Market radish along with many other long radishes.



Diameter about one cm and under, but some

are around one inch (2.5 cm) in the top part. 

Some sources say that another name for Cincinnati Market radish was Glass Radish because of brittleness. Mine aren't anywhere near brittle--in fact,I don't understand how a radish could be brittle like glass. [See this entry in Maule's Seed Catalog (1902), which says that they're hard to distinguish from Long Scarlet radishes.]

One of the best sources of info on this I've found so far are books on gardening by Adolph Kruhm published around WW I.  In his Home Vegetable Gardening from A to Z, Kruhm (1918) discusses in relatively great detail when to grow various kinds of radishes. According to him, the White Icicle radish could "be considered the greatest all-around general purpose radish in cultivation"(p. 194), so I might try them. [Kruhm's introduction starts with this claim: "April 15, 1917, will go down as one of the most momentous days in American history. quite apart from the fact that it marked our entrance into the World War" (p. v). His Home Vegetable Gardening (1914), maybe an earlier version of the A to Z book, gives less detailed advice but has a table of contents with links.]
Added on June 18:
Although older sources, such as Maule's Seed Catalog, try to distinguish Cincinnati Market from Long Scarlet, more recent catalogs seems to interchange the names. Besides Seeds Savers Exchange, the Long Scarlet is available from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and Sustainable Seed Company, which quotes from Isabell's Seed Catalog (1935): "The finest long red radish. This superior forcing radish was bred up by the Glass Gardeners near Cincinnati and no finer radishes go into any market. The tops are so small that the radishes may stand touching one another in the rows."

I wonder now whether the Glass Radish name could be from this Glass Gardeners organization or family rather than that they were brittle like glass. (Or maybe Glass Gardeners is another name for people who use greenhouses?)  I agree that the slender size lets me grow these close together. Another advantage is that the carrot shape is maybe easier to eat and slice. The Sustainable Seed Company's description of White Icicle Radishes argues that "Long radishes were once all the rage. Why have a small ball type radish when you could grow three times the mass in the same surface area? It wasn't until the late 1930s and early 1940s that ball or globe radishes became popular."  This point about output makes sense; however, radishes usually don't take up that much space. I often plant them as filler, such as along carrots before they become big.

French breakfast, a radish I've grown in the past, can occasionally reach these lengths, but my experience is that they're usually under 4 inches. The bottom--maybe 1/4th--part is white and the rest is a medium red. Burpee has a red variety--Salad Rose--that looks rather similar to Cincinnati Market, but the description says it comes from Russia. If I can find some seeds on sale, I might try to plant a bunch of varieties together and then compare.