I had some old seed of radish so I broadcast them in  the end of a row where winter squash was planted and haven’t been unrolling the woven ground cover until I harvest the radishes. I cut off the tops and leave them under the ground cover as I roll it out.

I rinse off root crops in some rainwater before I take them in the house, to preserve as much of the topsoil in the garden as possible.  I have a couple of barrels set up to collect rain water off one side of the roof of our garage.  I fill some 5 gal buckets (18 liter) out of that to increase storage capacity.  I wash the root crops in the buckets so the dirt doesn’t accumulate in the rain barrels but gets dumped back into the garden with the  irrigation.

I was swishing them off yesterday one by one, most done,  when I dropped one and noticed it floated.  So I came to the conclusion that radishes floated, which I saw as an amusing revelation coming so late after gardening for my entire life. I surmised that henceforth rinsing radishes would be much simpler.

So today I confidently went to the bucket and dumped all the radishes in.  Update: not all radishes float.  As I was clearing all the radishes in an area to unroll the ground cover, I was not only taking full sized ones but also really small ones.  Some of the small ones sank to the bottom of the bucket.

So since I now know that not all radishes float, doubt has entered in and I have started to wonder if there would be varietal differences as well as stage of maturity in whether they float or not, or if climatic differences, like wet versus dry during the growth period,  would also influence whether they will float or not.

While this is not that important in the scope of my life,  and I won’t design any studies to pursue the answers, I do find it more interesting than whether or not the politicians  raise the debt ceiling.