Our family loves broccoli we eat it several times a week. We decided to plant this favorite veggie even though I had heard it was hard to grow. This is the first year we have ever planted broccoli. I really didn't know how it was going to do. We planted them in April thinking that we still had enough cool weather ahead of us, boy were we mistaken. Our spring is usually very cold and rainy, but this spring it reach 80 degrees and up for many days. We had the driest spring we have ever seen. This was really bad for our broccoli. Just as they really started to grow that heat wave hit and half of our broccoli bolted.We were so frustrated. A very interesting thing happened though, the broccoli that was planted at the end of the potato rows weren't even affected by the heat. In fact they hadn't grown very much at all. We wondered at this, could it be because the broccoli was surrounded by straw. My dear husband was worried that he made a mistake by planting them there. I told him lets just wait and see what happens. The row that wasn't planted in the straw continued to have trouble. By the time it was ready to eat about 3/4 of the row bolted. The heads were very small and sparse. We weren't very happy with them. The broccoli that was planted in the straw still didn't have a head on them. There was no sign of a broccoli head starting, no side shoots, nothing. This really seemed strange, then again we are new to growing broccoli. Meanwhile we pulled up most of the bolted broccoli, but left a couple to continue flowering in hopes to get seeds. A week passed and finally we saw the beginnings of a head on all the broccoli that was planted in the straw. Slowly but surely the heads developed, it took awhile. When we decided to harvest them they were huge compared to the other broccoli we harvested. The heads on them were about 6-7 inches across and there side shoots were bigger than the heads of our other broccoli. They were beautiful.
Now that we have harvested most of our broccoli it's time to plant the second season of our broccoli. We have sown the seeds directly in the garden. Once they have grown large enough we are going to surround them in straw and see if this helps them stay cool through our short summer. We are hoping that by the end of the summer we will have some nice sized broccoli to harvest. We will be documenting how our broccoli does in these conditions and post our findings.
This is close to what our broccoli in the straw looked like. We were so excited to eat it we forgot to take a picture of them. I will remember to take some pictures of our next batch.
No comments:
Post a Comment