A few weeks ago I received a press release from Waitrose about their new Alan Titchmarsh gardening range. It’s a fairly routine set of offerings, all nicely packaged up. The one that caught my eye was their ‘Broadfen’ horseradish thong, which they said is a “heritage variety first grown by the Egyptians (1500 BC).”
I did a quick Google, and the internet appears to agree that horseradish was probably first grown by the Ancient Egyptians. But there’s no (online) evidence that it was any particular variety, and it seems unlikely to have been passed down through history to land up (exclusively) on Waitrose shelves. I enquired of the PR people whether Waitrose had any evidence to back up their claim. Stony silence. There’s actually very little reference online to named varieties of horseradish at all.
I was going to Waitrose anyway, so I invested £2.50 to buy a Broadfen thong. It’s not an unreasonable price; if you buy horseradish from a seed company you’ll pay maybe £6 for a handful, and I only wanted one plant. If you have an allotment, or a gardening friend, you can almost certainly get your hands on horseradish for free, by asking them to divide their plant and give you a bit. Horseradish is a thug of a plant. If it’s not confined in a big pot (some people recommend a dustbin) then it could well take over your entire garden. And most people don’t eat that much roast beef.
So, what’s a thong? Well, it’s basically a root cutting. My Broadfen thong looked like this*:
I took that photo a month ago, when I planted it up in a big pot on the allotment. So far it has shown no signs of life, so I’ll have to keep you posted on its progress. According to the growing instructions, the best time to harvest my horseradish is in the autumn,
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