[Brutus]

Hellooo

I have a quick question about broccoli.

I planted a couple of beds of broccoli in March and April and they have come up a treat. They are in good soil and have been regularly watered.   I have about 15 or so whopping great plants, all at least a metre high with sizable leaves on and looking really healthy.  However, there is absolutely no sign of any buds coming - zilch.

I have never grown this before - and I know that here in Sweden, some crops take a bit longer because of the climate, so maybe it's a bit early and the crop will come later in the year.  Or have I done something silly and so will get nothing to harvest?

Thanks,

Brutus 

[mumofstig]

can you remember the variety - it always helps determine harvest date 

[Snoop]

can you remember the variety - it always helps determine harvest date 

I was just about to ask the selfsame question. But I can't claim great minds think alike. I'm having one of those worrying days...

[Brutus]

No, sorry.  My wife says she binned the seed packet.  I didn't know it made a difference.

 

[Snoop]

Well, the answer then is to keep on watering and feeding. They might be purple sprouting broccoli, in which case you will get lots of absolutely delicious shoots starting at the top and then appearing down the sides. If that happens, don't cut them off all at once. Leave a few as it will encourage more to grow. You could be harvesting for weeks!

If you search for psb/purple sprouting broccoli on this site, you'll see how popular it is.

Happy chomping.

[Brutus]

Thanks for the advice, Snoop.  I have noticed that the stalks are a bright purple colour, so I'm looking forward to seeing what comes off these plants.

I was a bit concerned that I have such strapping plants but no sign of anything edible as yet.

I did read somewhere that, once the crop is finished, the smaller broccoli leaves can be cooked and eaten and that they taste similar to kale.

[beesrus]

Most broccoli is biennial and gives of it's food after a cold spell has occurred .. ie the Winter. A very few broccolis will now flower in the same year as they are planted but don't usually do so until the early Autumn. Often confused with calabrese that can look very similar but are also annuals that do their thing in the same year they  are planted. Purplish leaves/stems and a metre high sounds like purple sprouting broccoli that is most often a biennial.

[Brutus]

beesrus

So no broccoli until next year, then?  Wow, that's a blow.  I was hoping to enjoy it this autumn/winter.

I hope it is strong enough to survive the winters here. In winter, we can get temperatures of minus 20C and snow that's a metre deep!

[beesrus]

Not necessarily Brutus. There's a small chance your broccoli seed were the annual "Autumn PSB" that do crop Autumn into Winter, rather than the ubiquitous "early PSB" that crop late Winter into Spring.
PSB are quite hardy, they can survive a bad English Winter. Don't know about -20 though 

[Brutus]

Oh well, time will tell.

Thanks for the info. 

[Snoop]

We hit minus 17 ºC at night on occasions and our PSB survives, though it is significantly warmer than that during the day. Do you have cabbages in the ground over winter? If so, your PSB is likely to be OK.

[Brutus]

It is now all academic.

This afternoon, we had a freak storm - and I have never seen anything like it in the five years I have lived here.  For two solid hours we had intermittent hail and extremely heavy rain - sort of monsoon plus.  Some of the hailstones were the size of chestnuts and they were coming down at a heck of a speed.  We were mostly afraid they could have damaged the cars parked on our driveway - or even the roof of our house. It was such a torrent that the drains were overwhelmed and the road outside our property looked more like a river.  We had a basement flood up to about 3 cms  and spent the entire afternoon trying to remove the water build-up before it caused too much damage.  We managed to get the basement mostly dry, with the sauna left on and the dehumidifiers working at full belt.

I have just been to check the veg plot and it looks like a bomb site.  It has flattened all the broccoli, plus all my parsnips, red onions, silverskin onions and carrots (although I know the carrots will come back). We had a poor crop of plums this year to begin with, but the storm has kocked off half of the unripened ones.  It has also caused havoc with the various flowers we have.

I could cry! 

[New shoot]

Oh that is bad news    There's not much I can say, except that I do feel for you after all the work you have put in

Is there any chance to sow anything else now or are your summers too short to allow this ?  In the UK we can still get catch crops of fast maturing stuff like turnips and spring onions in, plus oriental greens for the autumn.

[Brutus]

Hi New Shoot - thanks for the commiserations.  It is sickening when you tend to plants, regularly water them, feed them, puul out the weeks every fewdays and then, in one storm, you lose the lot!

It's a bit late in the season to start planting here in Sweden.  After the torrential rains, the soil is like a bog anyway and there isn't much I can do with it at the moment.  I'll give it a day to dry out and then have another look at the flattened plants and see if I can stand any of them up again, but I'm not hopeful. Many of the red onions were coming close to being harvested anyway.  I have noticed that my cabbages and savoys seem to have been unharmed, as are my leeks, so all is not lost.

If I can't save the broccoli, I'll talk to my local garden centre to see if there is anything I can plant this time of year.

[Yorkie]

Hope you manage to salvage more than you expect, even if it's by harvesting and freezing (you can do that with onions, for example - chop them up first).