BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – Horseradish, says Charlie Nardozzi, it’s a traditional vegetable. It’s a perennial vegetable, which is one of the reasons I like growing it.

Plant it and it keeps coming up.

Every year it’ll keep coming up. In fact, it’ll spread. So you do have to be careful about where you put it in your garden. But as it’s spreading, it gives you an opportunity to harvest it.

Starting after a frost, that usually kind of sweetens up, believe it or not, sweetens up the roots a little bit. You can start harvesting it right right up until the ground freezes. And what you’re going to look for when you’re harvesting your horseradish is you’re going to look for some of the younger plants because the older plants are going to tend to have a really thick root that’s going to be very woody and tough and not as flavorful. So you’ll look for that and you’ll just be digging it up. You’re going to try to dig out hopefully a one-year-old root and that’s one that’s not too thick. That’s about 8 to 10 inches long.

Should you try to weed out some of those older ones if you’re not going to want to eat them at some point?

Exactly. That’s what I’m going to be doing. So starting now, then going up until the ground freezes, I’ll be kind of digging them out every week or so and pushing the whole thing back and taking some of the older plants out as well.

If you leave any root in the soil, it’s going to grow right back up into a new plant. So don’t worry about killing your plant. You never will.

So we’re going to dig up this one right here. Looks like a nice candidate. And we’re going to see what we have here. And don’t worry so much about splitting the roots or cracking the roots. So there’s a piece of root as it’s snap off, but that’s a nice one because that’s about a one-year-old size of a root. So you can get that one out. We’ve got some littler ones here that would be okay. I probably would just replant those for next year.

And then we can look for some bigger ones. Let’s see what we can find. What do we got over here? And then here’s some other ones that are kind of a little older, little older roots that are there.

And that one in the middle looks thick and woody, yeah.

So what you would ideally would do is kind of dig around it and not have to slice right through it like I did, but I just wanted to get it out so you can see it and see what it looks like. But these are all very usable roots that you have. So you can harvest a whole bunch of them, and if you’re not going to use them immediately, you can just put them in your refrigerator in a plastic bag and they’ll last for weeks. And then when you’re ready to process them, then you can take them out and grind them up and do all that kind of stuff.

So once you’ve got them and you want to make your horseradish sauce, which is a really nice thing to do, what I do is I take a couple of the roots and chop them up into little one-inch sections, throw them in a food processor with a little bit of water, a little bit of vinegar, and grind them up into almost like a slurry. And then I add some mayo to that, some lemon juice, some salt, and a little sugar. That’s the thing.

And once you do.

That, you put it on a cracker with a little Gouda cheese. You want to try some, don’t you?

Sure. Well, this looks like a very nice little appetizer plate.

And it’s all for you. Okay, thank you. So we have a nice little cracker, like I said, some horseradish, Gouda. What do you think? Is it good?

That’s good.

Yeah. Okay, I’ll grab it with you with my dirty hand. So the key is putting a little bit of sugar in. That sweetens it enough and so it’s not as hot as it normally would be. You have the creaminess with the mayo and you’re all set. You got something to eat.

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