GardenRadish variety
Purple Heart Radish
✓ In your garden
Purple Heart is a purple to pink watermelon radish, ready in about 48 days. A big winter type — slower, but great grated raw, roasted, or pickled. Sow directly in cool weather and thin so the roots can swell.
“A big, slow winter radish for cooking and pickling.”
Growing basics — shared by every radish
Purple Heart grows like any other radish. The full picture — how deep to plant, spacing, feeding, pests, harvest — lives on the Radish page so it's maintained in one place.
- Sun
- Full Sun
- Spacing (in row)
- 1–3 in
- Row spacing
- 10–12 in
- Planting depth
- 0.25–0.5 in
- Soil pH
- 6–7
- Water
- Moderate
What is Purple Heart good for?
- Raw & saladsCrisp and peppery. Great
- PicklingQuick pickles love radishes. Great
- RoastingBig winter types roast mild and sweet. Great
From how it grows — kitchens vary.
What Purple Heart is known for
Johnny's Selected Seeds describes this as:
- slow to run to seed in heat
That is the company selling the seed, describing its own product. True, and worth weighing as such.
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Want the full 10/50/90% odds + nearest stations? Open the frost tool →When to plant Purple Heart in your zone
Zone 6bGreenhouse or cover on: your start slides ~4 weeks earlier and your harvest stretches ~3 weeks later (shown striped).
Planting seeds straight in the ground only works where the season's long and warm — most gardeners start seeds indoors or buy young plants, or you'd pick your first tomato right as frost hits.
Comfortable — first ripe fruit lands around mid May, well before your typical frost (~late Oct).
- Plant seeds outside
- late Mar – early Apr
- Growing
- early Apr – mid May
- Picking
- mid May – late May
Typical dates for zone 6b — set your zone or ZIP above for yours.
What to plant near Purple Heart — and what to keep away
-
CarrotsPractical
Radishes sprout in days, mark your carrot row, and are gone before carrots need the space.
The badge is the honesty. Trialed = a published field trial · Practical = a real mechanism · Traditional = companion-chart lore. These pairings hold for every radish.
Growing Purple Heart — the things that trip people up
- Speed is the secret to a good radish — grow them fast in cool weather with steady water. Slow, hot, or dry conditions make them woody, cracked, and blistering hot.
- Thin the seedlings early so each root has room to swell, and pull small types promptly — left too long, they split and turn pithy.
Purple Heart radish at a glance
| Type | Watermelon |
|---|---|
| Days to ripe | 48 days after you plant it outside |
| Color | Purple, Pink |
Extra fields from seed-catalog listings and university growing guides. Days to ripe and disease resistance shift with your climate and seed source — double-check with your local extension office before you buy.
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Common questions about Purple Heart
How long does Purple Heart take to grow?
About 48 days from sowing. Sow directly and thin the seedlings.
Browse more radish varieties →