When to Harvest Turnips Before They Go Woody

Pull them earlier than you think

The single most common mistake with turnips is leaving them in the ground because they are still getting bigger. They are, but past a certain point the extra size is fiber. The flesh turns pithy, a hollow or a woody core forms in the middle, and the flavor goes from sweet and nutty to harsh and sulfurous.

For a standard summer turnip the sweet spot is two to three inches (5 to 7 cm) across. At that size the whole root cooks evenly, the skin does not need peeling and it can be eaten raw. Roots for storing are grown at wider spacing and can go to four inches (10 cm), but even those are better lifted young than left.

The size is easy to judge without pulling anything. Turnip roots sit high and the shoulders push up out of the soil, so scrape a little soil aside with a finger and you can measure the widest point directly.

Take a test root as soon as the first one looks close, and cut it in half. The cross section tells you immediately whether the rest of the row has days or weeks left, and it is worth sacrificing one plant for that.

How to lift them without damage

Turnips come out of the ground easily, which is exactly why people break them. The root is brittle and the top snaps off the crown if you pull straight up on the leaves alone in dry ground.

1. Water the row the day before If the ground is hard and dry, water thoroughly the evening before lifting. The roots come out whole instead of snapping, and the soil falls off them cleanly rather than baking on.
2. Gather the leaves and twist Take hold of the whole leaf cluster low down at the crown, not by one or two leaves, and pull with a slight twist. On loose soil that is all it takes.
3. Ease the ground first if it resists Push a hand fork in three inches (7 cm) away from the root and lever gently, then pull. Levering directly under a turnip spears it, and a speared root will not keep even for a day.
4. Take alternate plants first Rather than clearing from one end, lift every other plant at the smaller size. The ones left behind get double the room and fill out over the following fortnight, which stretches the harvest across two or three weeks.

The tops are half the crop

Turnip greens are a genuine vegetable and not a by-product. They are peppery when raw and go mild and slightly sweet when cooked, and they carry more of the flavor people associate with the plant than the root does. Any gardener throwing the tops on the compost is discarding half of what they grew.

There are two ways to get them. Cut a few outer leaves from plants that are still growing the root, taking no more than a third of the foliage from any one plant so the root keeps filling. Or sow a short row deliberately close, at an inch (2.5 cm) apart, and cut the whole thing as a leaf crop at four to six weeks.

1. Cut young, at six to eight inches Leaves at six to eight inches (15 to 20 cm) are tender. Older leaves toughen and the hairs on the underside become noticeable, so cut before the leaf is fully expanded.
2. Take outer leaves, leave the center Cut from the outside of the rosette with scissors and leave the growing point and the young central leaves untouched. Taken this way, a plant will give you two or three cuts before the root is ready.
3. Use them the same day The leaves wilt fast once cut. Stand the stems in water if you are not cooking them straight away, and expect them to keep no more than two days in the fridge.
4. Cut leaves off roots you are storing Anything going into store loses its tops immediately. Twist or cut them off half an inch (1 cm) above the crown; leaves left on continue to draw water out of the root and it goes soft in a week.

Storing what you cannot eat now

A summer turnip pulled at three inches is not a storage vegetable. It has thin skin and high water content and it will go rubbery in a fortnight, so treat it as something to eat within a week or two. Roots grown at wide spacing in cool weather, with firmer flesh and a thicker skin, are the ones that keep.

Never wash roots before storing. Water on the skin is what starts the rot. Brush the soil off dry, discard anything with a cut or a maggot hole, and store only clean, sound roots.

What to record at harvest

The harvest is where the useful numbers are, and they are gone within a day of clearing the bed. A few lines written at the time will change how you sow next season more than anything else you can do.

1. Days from sowing to first pull Count back to the sowing date and write down the number of days. That figure, on your soil, lets you plan a sowing to land at the week you actually want turnips.
2. The date they went over Note when the roots started to turn pithy. The gap between the first good root and the first bad one is the length of your usable window, and it tells you how far apart to space successional sowings.
3. How many were lost, and to what Count the roots you threw away and why: maggot holes, splits, forking, bolting. Repeat losses point at one fixable cause rather than at bad luck.
4. Which end of the bed did best Turnips are sensitive to shade and to drainage, so one end of a row often clearly outperforms the other. Record which, and put next season's sowing there.