Living in North Central Texas means we go through periods of drought each summer. Every July, the rains stop almost completely until late August or early September. Much of our pasture goes dormant. That makes grazing a lot less nutritious for our sheep and over all taxes our soil and all the life it supports. Given that we have a very heavy black clay soil, we need to stake steps each fall to entice life back.
One of the chief plants that are recommended is the Daikon radish. The idea is that this plant with it’s high sugar tuber will grow in the ground and then over winter, die and the remains of the tuber will feed the soil. And it does that. But what if there were a better choice? There is, and my recommendation is to plant the modest turnip.
Turnips are cheaper to sow. In a cost comparison, a pound of Daikon radish seed was $136 while on the same website, the Shogoin turnip was $10.92 for 1 pound. Quite the price differential! Moreover, you get more seeds. One pound of Daikon radish seeds gets you around 44,800 seeds. That sounds impressive until you find out that one pound of the Shogoin turnips has around 156,000 seeds. Almost 4 times more seeds.
The tiny seeds of the turnip make them harder for my free ranging chickens to find. That’s a good thing. And last year when I broadcast both turnip and daikon radish seeds, the turnips had a far better germination rate and sprouted in days if broadcast right before a good rain.
To my surprise, the young leaves of turnips are very tasty. They have a sweet and peppery taste. I tried them after watching my chickens gobble them up even faster than the sheep ate them. I enjoyed them so much I would just pluck a few to eat on my way down to the barn. And then there is the turnip itself. I’m not a big turnip fan but we did pull some and had them for dinner. At other times, I diced up the root and fed it to the sheep, they really liked it.
However, at the end of the day, how did it do with helping our pasture? Well I’ll let pictures of our pasture speak to the success. We went from being totally dormant by mid August 2022 to green pasture in mid September 2022. The benefits really showed up in the spring of 2023 when all sorts of plants sprung into life.
