How to Grow Turnips: Two Crops From One Fast Sowing

GardenDraft Team · August 18, 2026 · Updated August 1, 2026 · 8 min read

Part of: Garden Planning Guides · Planting Calendar & Frost Date Guides · How to Grow Vegetables — Crop Guides A–Z

Turnips are two vegetables in one fast, easy package (a crisp, sweet root and a flush of tender, nutritious greens) and they're ready remarkably quickly. A spring or fall sowing goes from seed to harvest in as little as five to seven weeks, with almost no fuss along the way. They're an old-fashioned, dependable cool-season crop that deserves more space in modern gardens, especially the fall garden, where they're at their best.

A cool-season root

Turnips grow best in the cool weather of spring and fall and turn woody, bitter, and likely to bolt in summer heat — so treat them like radishes or beets and aim for the shoulders of the season. The fall crop is usually the sweeter one: roots that size up as the weather cools, and a touch of frost actually improves their flavor. Sow in late summer for fall, or as early as the soil can be worked in spring for an early-summer pull before the heat arrives.

Picking a turnip: storage globes, salad types, and greens

The classic purple-top globe is the storage workhorse — white roots blushed purple at the shoulder, dense and sweet, at 47–63 days by catalog. At the other end are the Japanese salad turnips (the Tokyo Market lineage and its kin), small, white, and so mild they're eaten raw like an apple; catalog listings run 25 to 45 days, which makes them one of the fastest real vegetables you can sow. Golden-fleshed and red types sit in between, prettier on the plate and similar in culture. Finally there are greens-first varieties bred for tops rather than roots, ready to cut in a month. If you're new to turnips, sow a salad type in spring for speed and a purple-top in late summer for the root cellar — the two ends of the crop barely feel like the same vegetable.

The frost-date windows

Turnips are frost-hardy (the catalog rates them to the low 20s°F) and their sowing window opens 1 to 4 weeks before your last spring frost. Spring rows should be in the ground early enough to mature before real heat, which is why the fast salad types are the best spring bet. For fall — the main event — count the variety's days back from your first frost date and add a week or two of buffer; a purple-top sown about 8 to 10 weeks before first frost sizes up in perfect cooling weather, and light frosts on the mature crop only sweeten it. With germination at 75–80 percent and the catalog's 14-day succession interval, short repeated sowings beat one long row at both ends of the year — the standard succession planting move. Both windows for your ZIP code are on the planting calendar.

Direct-sow turnips in loose soil

Turnips form their root fast and don't transplant well, so always direct-sow them where they'll grow, about a quarter to half an inch deep in full sun. Like other root crops they want loose, stone-free soil to size up cleanly — heavy or rocky ground gives forked, stunted roots. The most important step is thinning: crowded turnips compete and stay small or run to all leaves, so thin seedlings to about 4 inches apart once they're up (and eat the thinnings as baby greens). Keep them evenly watered for crisp, mild roots, since dry spells make them woody and hot.

Spacing by the square, and feeding

That 4-inch thinning distance is also the catalog's square-foot value: 9 turnips per square foot in a square-foot bed, or up to 16 for the smallest salad types pulled young. Soil-wise, turnips ask for less than almost anything: moderate fertility, no fresh manure, and no extra nitrogen, which produces magnificent tops over marble-sized roots. If the bed grew a well-fed crop last season, its leftovers are plenty. The two inputs that genuinely matter are loose ground and the steady inch of water a week — everything else is optional.

Don't forget the greens

Turnip greens are a genuine second crop, not an afterthought — tender, peppery, and cooked like any other leafy green. You can grow turnips specifically for the tops (some varieties are bred for it), or just harvest a few outer leaves from each plant as it grows while the root develops below. Take only a few leaves per plant if you want a good root too, since the plant needs its foliage to bulk up underground.

Troubleshooting a brassica in disguise

Turnips are cabbage-family plants, and their pest list follows. Flea beetles shothole the seedling leaves — mostly cosmetic on a root crop, but heavy pressure slows young plants, and a row cover at sowing prevents it entirely. That same cover blocks the cabbage root maggot, the one pest that ruins the root itself, tunneling brown galleries through the flesh in cool, wet springs. Cabbage worms chew ragged holes in the tops; pick them or cover the row. Because it's a brassica, keep turnips in the cabbage slot of your crop rotation — don't follow cabbage, broccoli, or radishes in the same ground, which starves out clubroot and the maggot cycle. Cracked or hollow roots trace to feast-and-famine watering; woody, hot ones simply stayed in the ground too long.

Interplanting the speed

Because turnips finish in five to seven weeks, they slot into gaps the way radishes do, just one size larger. Sow a band alongside newly transplanted brussels sprouts or other slow growers and the turnips are pulled before the big plants need the room; tuck a spring row where the tomatoes will go a month later. The one caution is family loyalty — they're brassicas, so don't use them as filler among other cabbage relatives if flea beetles or root maggots have been a problem, since shared pests concentrate.

Pull them on time

Harvest turnips young and tender, at about 2 to 3 inches across — much bigger and they turn pithy, woody, and strong-flavored. Smaller roots are sweeter and milder, so don't leave them sitting in the ground too long. A fast crop usually outruns serious damage even without covers, which is part of the charm.

Turnips in containers

Salad turnips are a quietly excellent container crop. A pot or window box 8 inches deep grows the small Japanese types to perfection, and even purple-tops manage in a 12-inch-deep container; fresh potting mix is naturally the loose, rock-free ground that grows clean globes. Sow on the same grid you'd thin to in a bed — nine per square foot — keep the mix evenly moist (a dried-out pot is the fastest route to woody, hot roots), and skip fertilizer entirely, since potting mixes carry more than enough nutrition for a 40-day root crop. The container advantage is the calendar: pots warm early in spring and can be shifted to afternoon shade at the hot end of the season, stretching both windows past what the open bed allows, the standard trick of container vegetable growing. One 2-foot window box, resown as it empties, keeps a kitchen in crisp salad turnips for months — greens included.

Storing the harvest

Twist the tops off (they pull moisture from the root) and use them within a few days; the roots themselves keep two weeks in the fridge, and the fall storage types hold two to three months somewhere cold and humid — the classic root-cellar conditions covered in storing root vegetables. In mild-winter regions you can skip storage entirely and leave the fall row in the ground under a deep mulch, pulling as needed until a hard freeze threatens. Time your spring and fall sowings on the planting calendar.