🌱✗ Tested and false“Turnip and swede are just two names for the same vegetable”
They are different species, turnip is Brassica rapa and swede is Brassica napus, and different crops in every way that affects growing: turnip is ready in 6-10 weeks and can be sown repeatedly from March to August, while swede is a single May-June sowing that takes up to six months. In some parts of the UK, swedes, with larger orange and purple roots, are known as turnips, which is exactly where the confusion comes from.
Our read The regional overlap in naming is real, not just a Scotland/England thing, which makes the seed-packet check worth doing wherever you're buying from. Sow expecting a 6-week turnip and get a swede-length crop, or the reverse, and your rotation plan for that bed is wrong for months.
What to do: Check the Latin name if the common name is ambiguous: Brassica rapa for turnip, Brassica napus for swede. If you want a fast, repeatable crop to fill gaps through the growing season, that's turnip; if you want one long-season root standing into winter, that's swede.
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- RHSIn some parts of the UK, swedes, with larger orange and purple roots, are known as turnips
“The leaves you thin or trim off a turnip are just waste, only the root is worth eating”
Turnip is 'a doubly useful crop' precisely because the leaves, or turnip tops, are edible too, cooked like spinach. They can be harvested alongside the roots or picked young, cut-and-come-again, for repeated pickings.
Our read It's an easy leaf to overlook if you've only ever bought the root in a shop, where the tops are usually removed before sale.
What to do: Don't compost your thinnings. Small thinned leaves go straight into a salad; larger leaves from established plants can be cooked like spinach. Cut tops sparingly from roots you plan to grow on, so the plant still has enough leaf to bulk up the root.
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- RHSThe leaves are edible too, making this a doubly useful crop; turnip tops can be harvested with the roots or picked young as a cut-and-come-again crop
“A turnip that bolts (runs to flower) means the soil was poor or wrong”
Bolting comes from dry conditions, not soil quality. Turnips grow best in moisture-retentive soil, and water stress is what pushes the plant to flower early rather than bulk up its root.
Our read It's a natural assumption to blame the ground when a crop fails, but the fix here is in the watering can, the same lesson as swede's split roots, not the fertiliser.
What to do: Keep the soil consistently moist, especially through any dry spell after sowing. If bolting is a repeat problem on your plot, 'Oasis' is a specifically slow-to-bolt AGM variety worth trying instead.
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- RHSBolting occurs in dry conditions; 'Oasis' AGM is a Japanese type slow to bolt
“Turnip seedlings always need thinning to a wide spacing, the same as other root crops”
RHS treats this as a choice, not a fixed rule: thinning 'may not be necessary' if you're growing baby veg, but full-size maincrop roots do need thinning, down to 23cm apart. Swede, by contrast, needs thinning either way, whatever size root you want.
Our read Turnip is the one root vegetable where 'do I need to thin it' genuinely depends on the answer to a different question first, namely how big you want the roots.
What to do: Sowing for baby veg, thinned young and eaten small: little to no thinning needed, and the thinnings themselves are a usable salad crop. Growing to full maincrop size: thin to 23cm apart (15cm for early varieties) once seedlings are large enough to handle.
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- RHSThinning may not be necessary if growing baby veg; thin to 23cm (9in) apart for maincrops, 15cm (6in) for early varieties, using the leafy thinnings in salads
“Like most root vegetables, turnip has one narrow sowing window each year”
Turnip has one of the longest, most repeatable sowing windows of any root vegetable: successive small batches every few weeks from March to mid-August, with an even earlier start possible in February under cloches.
Our read This is the opposite problem from swede, which gets exactly one sowing window and needs it. Treating turnip the same way as swede, one sowing and done, wastes most of a growing season it could otherwise be filling.
What to do: Sow little and often rather than one big batch: a few metres of row every 2-3 weeks from March keeps young roots and turnip tops coming right through to autumn, and slots neatly into whatever bed space opens up between other crops.
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- RHSSow outdoors from March to mid-August in succession; sow under cloches in February for an earlier crop
“Turnips don't store — use them straight away or they're wasted”
Turnip roots keep for weeks after lifting, not days. Autumn-harvested roots can be stored for several weeks in trays of moist coir or sand in a cool, frost-free place, and in mild parts of the country you can skip lifting altogether: roots left under cloches or fleece can simply be dug as needed through winter.
What to do: Lift a batch and box it in moist sand or coir rather than pulling roots one at a time as you need them, or leave a run standing under fleece if your ground doesn't sit wet over winter.
In Scotland: The leave-in-ground option needs a sheltered, free-draining plot — on wetter or upland ground, lifting into a box of sand is the safer bet, the same lowland/upland split that applies to swede.
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- RHSAutumn-harvested roots can be stored for several weeks in trays of moist coir or sand, in a cool, frost-free place; in mild regions roots can be left in the ground under cloches or fleece and lifted as needed through winter
