This week we harvested 45 broccoli heads! Don't get too excited for us. They were itsy, bitsy, teeny, weeny heads. We got a total of 1 pound. I asked Belle to make something special with them, because they were probably the most labor intensive 1 pound bag of broccoli florets ever grown!
We planted them along with
cauliflower and cabbage on September 15. That's very late in the season
for our zone. We didn't use row covers. The
plants went through several days, even weeks of freezing nights. We finally
harvested them because they were showing signs of flowering.
Our goal was to push the growing season as long as possible. We pushed it too far, but in the process we learned a lot. If you're interested, below the pictures in this post, there is a short list of things we learned.
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| broccoli plants under hay to protect from freezing. |
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| a frozen droopy broccoli leaf |
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| a tiny broccoli head less than an inch across |
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| a frozen tiny broccoli head |
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| Winter harvest 1 lb |
What we learned:
1. The broccoli withstood freezing temps quite remarkably. Cabbage withstood them too, though not as well. The cauliflower could not take the freezing weather for more than a week.
2. The broccoli and cabbage (not harvested yet) continued growing, even with short days of light.
3. We believe that with hoop houses we could get a substantial broccoli and cabbage harvest as late as early Dec.
4. Next year, if we have no hoop houses, we'll plant our fall garden brassicas outside in mid August. With hoop houses we'll plant them in early September.
We feel like we have a better understanding of the growing season than we've ever had before. We didn't get much broccoli or cabbage, but we've learned stuff we'd never know if we hadn't done this. Even though it was a lot of work, we're glad we did it.
