Hey everyone Kevin here from Epic Gardening. I hope you are having a good time. I hope you had a great weekend and you're ready to crack into the garden as we move into the full swing of spring no matter where you are in the country. It's really kind of getting to that point where almost all of us can get started growing.

And I figured we'd kick it off with something a little spicy and that would be horse radish what is

it and how do we grow it and is it something you could even really grow in the

garden well here's a fun fact horse radish roots have been around since

1500 BC at least as far as our knowledge of them.

It's a pungent root vegetable, popularly used as a spice.

The plants have been cultivated since time immemorial.

In fact, they famously been mentioned in Greek mythology

where the Delphic oracle confessed to Apollo

that horseradish roots are as precious as gold. Now, radish might not look like much but it's

certainly a staple spice used in many households. What's really surprising is

that even when they contain the name horse they are in fact poisonous to horses so it's an

odd name they're a perennial they're strong and resilient they can thrive in

almost any condition so let's figure out how to grow them.

Although the plant is commonly known as horse radish,

it goes by the botanical name

Armarassia Rusticana.

Sometimes it's known as Red Cole, and really it's these peppery roots of that plant that we've been using as a condiment for over 3,000 years.

If you've been wondering why it's called horse radish, it found that name through an interesting process. In German, horse

radish came to be known by the name, and I'm not going to say this right,

meretich, Merretich, something like that, or sea radish. Now that's because the roots grew by the sea, but many English-speaking people began

mispronouncing the word mere and started calling it mare radish, and so eventually the plant became known as horse radish.

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