[goodtogrow]

Wondered if anyone has ever just left their PSB for a second season and had another crop off it?

Mine is showing yellow flowers now like others on here but they're also showing new shoot growth - in other words they're behaving like a perennial shrub, flowering then putting on new growth.

Any comments?

Tom

[DD.]

Those new purple shoot will go yellow in a matter of days and won't be far behind your other yellow flowers.

You can get perennial broccoli:

http://chat.allotment-garden.org/index.php?topic=91880.0

but I'm afraid that you haven't.

[Salmo]

Just take off and compost every one of the shoots that have gone too far to eat and more shoots will keep coming for quite a long time. They will be smaller and smaller and go to flower quicker as the weather warms up. Eventually you will decide that picking is too much bother. That is the time to pull the plants up.

[goodtogrow]

Thanks for your comments.  Yes, they're showing new flowering shoots, but they're also showing new leaf shoots, just like dormant buds on the stems of shrubs emerge after flowering.

The nine star variety of broccoli is known to be perennial, and quite an old variety, so there's a good chance that modern (purple) varieties have some of the nine star bred into them for whatever reason.

So point taken about new flowering shoots being short-lived, but new leaf shoots?  Would still love to know if anyone has just left a psb, by neglect or design, and what their conclusions are.

Many thanks
Tom

[goodtogrow]

Sorry to go banging on about it but:

When we cut the head of a cabbage off, then leave the stalk in the ground, it produces new leaves - spring greens.  If we leave the leaves (!) alone, they develop into a new cabbage head, don't they?  It just regrows.  Like a perenial shrub would if you cut it down but left enough on it containing dormant buds.

So if a cabbage can, why not psb?  They're even the same family!  There are far more experienced growers out there than me, so please chew this cud! 

Tom

[Ivor Backache]

The question is not can it be done but why would you want to do it.
I have 6 plants which I have cropped twice. But they are in the way of Broad beans and the runner beans. I have  half a BB row and more seeds are germinating and I need to dig the RB trench.
Why leave these plants to occupy land when all I have to do is sow another 6 PSB seeds and plant them out later in the year to get the same result?

[DD.]

Yes cabbage leave will re-grow, but into a very poor imitation of the original product, so, as said, why do this when you can start again with nice new, vigorous plants?

[goodtogrow]

Thanks Ivor, that's just what I was fishing for - someone who's already done it!  And yes, we might prefer to free up space rather than leave them in, and rotate to avoid clubroot.  So in theory it can be done, but in practice it might not be worth it.  What provoked my question was that psb seems to take a lot of growing to produce a little crop.  It needs muck under it to make all that growth - and those stems!  It seems a waste just to throw them on the compo!

And thanks DD for pointing out that the regrowth is/can be weak - depending on variety?

Thanks for your great replies, and best wishes to everyone.

Tom