If you love broccoli – there is nothing better than home grown. It is so sweet and tender all it needs is a quick saute with a nice pat of butter and a sprinkle of sea salt. Yum!

For a spring crop, start seeds indoors sometime in February so you can transplant them into the ground the end of April or early May. For a fall crop, you can put seeds directly in the ground early to mid summer. Plant seeds about 1/4″ to 1/2″ deep. The best soil is at a pH of 6.5 to 7.5, well draining with a good amount of composted manure. Broccoli does best in full sun but can tolerate a bit of shade – it doesn’t do well in heat. Plant from 16″ to 2 feet apart for best production. Broccoli is in the cabbage / brassica / cole crop family so rotate planting spots at least every 2 years.

Broccoli is a slow grower and thrives with day temperatures in the 70’s and night temperatures in the 60’s. Frost will damage the plants – luckily for us we rarely get frost and we have our handy row covers. Make sure the plants are watered well and stay moist. Mid season, gently dig in some manure around each broccoli plant. With broccoli you will get a main central head which when harvested will make the plant begin to produce side shoots. Many broccoli aficionados prefer these tender side shoots over the central head.

Harvest the broccoli when the flower buds are still green and tight. If you wait too long the flowers will open and you will be very unhappy. Cut about 6-7″ below the head at an angle to prevent moisture from accumulating and causing stem rot. Side shoots will appear and you can cut those at the point they grow out of the main stem.

Don’t forget the leaves! Broccoli leaves can be harvested and prepared the same as kale, collards or other like greens.

The main pests that we see are aphids which can be easily taken care of with a dilute soap spray. The other which we got to experience first had are cabbage worms – big green and voracious. I knew they were coming as a few weeks before I discovered big chomps off the broccoli leaves – the garden was fluttering with white butterflies – ha! Moths really. Part of my morning routine for a few weeks was to go out to the garden and search & pluck out these green oozing worms.

Oh yes, one more pest that we seem to have at the moment – flea beetles. This I know as many of the leaves of our broccoli and kale have neat small holes rather than big chomps. More about these critters and how to take care of them in a future post.

Broccoli seems to be a pretty easy vegetable to grow and we’ll report on our progress.

If you love broccoli, give it a whirl…
Broccoli…plant it, grow it, eat it!

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But hey, Broccoli is oh so good for you!

• Loads of vitamin C and with a light steam you will retain a good amount of this heat sensitive vitamin
• vitamin K and beta carotene galore
• A good number of B’s including folic acid, B6, B2, B5, thiamin and niacin
• a gold mine of minerals: manganese, potassium, phosphorus, magnesium, iron, calcium and zinc

but wait there’s more…
broccoli is full of amazing phytonutrients that in lab studies block compounds that promote tumor growth, help detoxify the body of carcinogens, slow tumor growth and stimulate cell death in cancer cells. I say, “broc on!”

I tried to grow some last year but I now know that rats had chomped them down to the ground. Luck for us,  our friend and fellow gardener gave us some homegrown broccoli. Wow! I was in heaven – it was the sweetest most tender broccoli I ever had. This year I had to try again…
Round one of the seedlings started this summer suffered the same fate as last year. But this time, we knew what was eating our broccoli, so…

After getting rid of the rats, We got more seedlings started and they are slowly but surely growing under our row covers. To be honest I’m not sure how many broccoli plants I have out there since some did get munched on by a second swarm of ratlings but now we think those are gone (hopefully for good.)

Tomorrow, tips on growing your own sweet tender broccoli.

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