I REMEMBER the first time I saw a mooli. It was in the early 1980s, when a bloke brought one into my local pub from his allotment.

Once I’d stopped laughing at the name, I tried a slice of this cucumber-sized white radish, with a little dip of salt, and was astonished. At their best, moolis are milder and yet more flavoursome than ordinary red radishes, crunchy and full of juice.

As well as being perfect raw in salads, they are excellent lightly cooked —for instance, in a stir-fry or pickled.

The most common mistake people make with moolis, which came to us from China via Japan, is sowing them too early. If they encounter cold weather early in life, or mid-summer heat later on, they tend to run to flower.

July is the ideal time to start them off, and it’s also worth putting in a second batch right at the end of summer. Moolis are surprisingly frost-resistant, and if you can cover them in autumn with a few inches of dry straw they’ll often stand in good condition into the new year.

If you’re short of space on the summer allotment, they can be started in cellular trays for later transplanting, but I think they do better when sown directly into the soil. They don’t need a rich ground, and they certainly don’t want any fertiliser. In fact, their preference is probably for a patch that’s slightly on the thin, sandy side. But they’ll usually do well enough anywhere that isn’t waterlogged.

They do need to be in the open, not shaded by other crops, as they’ll be quite big plants by the time they’re done.

Make an indentation in the soil about half an inch deep, run some water along it from a small watering can or bottle and try to space the seeds in it a couple of inches apart. As they grow, thin the radishes out so that they end up something like six inches apart. You can eat the thinnings whole.

The young moolis need plenty of watering, to help them grow quickly and keep them crisp. Once they start to really swell up, however, pushing upwards out of the soil, it’s a good idea only to water them during a long dry spell, otherwise the roots can develop cracks. Keep them well weeded, too.

Slugs don’t usually give them too much trouble at this time of year, although they can attack mooli left in the ground in autumn and winter. Birds pecking at the foliage can be a problem, and the same caterpillars which bother cabbages will sometimes have a go at mooli leaves.

Both of those — and the most common and serious pest of mooli in dry conditions, which is the tiny flea beetle — can be kept away by covering the row with horticultural fleece. Harvest the radishes as soon as they’re big enough to eat, or leave them until early autumn for giant specimens.