Field Notes: Hakurei Turnips
There’s the ideal crop schedule, and then there’s reality. When plants don’t make it into the ground as early as we’d hoped, the less-than-ideal timing might lead to yield reduction, increased pest pressure, or more hands-on work. But this year, a later-than-desired hakurei turnip crop yielded some unexpected positives.
Sowed in two batches in mid to late October, the crop required more fussing - mostly in the form of covering and uncovering with cover-cloth during hard freezes. But we’ll admit that it was nice to have these delightful turnips in the mix so late into the winter. Pulling up bunches of hakurei was a reprieve from cutting collards in the doldrums of January.
A few weeks ago, we hosted some tenth grade students from a local high school for a job shadow day. A turnip harvest provided the opening activity, after which we introduced them to the hakurei’s taste. Sampling raw slices of turnip for the first time, these teens offered up straightforward descriptors - they found the flavor much like that of a carrot, and much preferred the taste when sprinkled with some salt and dry herbs.
What Are They?
Also called salad turnips or Tokyo turnips, hakurei turnips are in the brassica family. They produce pearl-white roots, and narrow green leaves, both of which are edible. Unlike classic purple or golden turnips, these can be enjoyed raw and lack the bitterness that sometimes comes with other cultivars.
As a category, turnips have a sad and storied link to food insecurity, having served as a subsistence crop across the globe throughout history. So significant was the role of turnips in Germany during World War 1, for example, that the winter between 1916 and 1917 was dubbed “The Turnip Winter.” Turnips were the only source of food for thousands of Germans after bad weather and diversion of agricultural resources to war efforts doomed that year’s potato crop.
The hakurei turnip was cultivated by seed breeders in the 1950s in Japan. During World War II, Japan experienced the greatest famine of any country involved in the conflict, and starvation and widespread rationing followed into the post war years. As Japanese agriculture picked back up, seed savers and breeders were prioritizing flavor and hardiness, and selected for a soft, salad-type turnip that would be easy to grow in a variety of zones. The resulting turnip, what we now refer to as the hakurei, took Japan by storm.
Growing Tips for Hakurei Turnips
Don’t forget to thin out your turnip plants consistently for larger roots.
Varieties
Hakurei (F1) - Johnny’s
Miyama (heirloom) - Baker Creek
Tokyo Market Turnip - Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
Season
In our part of North Carolina, hakurei turnips are best in the colder shoulder seasons - late fall and early spring. This year, we pushed planting later than normal, seeding in mid and late October, and harvesting from late December to early February. While it was nice to have these growing during the leaner months, it required more labor in the form of row cover during hard freezes.
Cold Protections
Hakurei are frost resistant, but you want to protect the roots from freezing. In temperatures under 30°, we made a habit of covering our beds with row cover. This isn’t necessary if you plant earlier in the fall or in the spring (unless there’s an unusually late hard freeze).
Disease and Pests
We’ve been fortunate to experience limited pest pressure with our hakurei crops. We deal with vegetable weevils, but this is largely contained to the greens - we often leave the greens to the weevils, and only use the bulbs for eating.
Storing and Preparing
Cut the roots from the greens and store separately in the refrigerator until ready to use. The roots will last in the refrigerator for 7 to 10 days; the greens, for 3 to 4.
To prepare hakurei, start with whether you want to enjoy them raw or cooked. We recently tasted hakurei turnips with a group of high schoolers, who were eating them for the first time. In asking them for descriptions, they compared the flavor to a mild carrot. For us, the texture and flavor has similarities to jicama, but with a very faint brassica-family tinge of pepper at the finish.
Raw:
-Treat them like radishes, and slice up the bulbs for your salad (the nickname “salad” turnip hold for a reason)
-Lightly pickle with spices like clove and star anise
-Grate into a slaw and dress with rice wine vinegar for piling onto banh mi
-Sprinkle with flaky salt and dried herbs
-Thinly slice and layer over buttered rye bread
Cooked:
-Pan sear with their greens, along with butter and miso
-Grill on skewers, and brush with honey
