How not to grow broccoli? It's dead easy if you pick the wrong weather. Here's how I did it. First, be lazy and buy a seedling, instead of seed. Then plant the seedling in autumn, right at the start of an unusually warm stretch of weather. Fertilise normally. Stand back! Here's what happens next...
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| Too late for harvest already. This broccoli head went from normal 'broccoli' to flower head in a matter of days. We blinked and missed our chance to harvest our crop. |
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| "Don't touch the broccoli!" our resident artist (Pammy) warned our resident gardener (me). Like someone glued to the TV screen watching a soap opera, she wanted to see what happened next. (Besides, might make a nice painting later on.) |
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| Each little blob-ette in a head of broccoli is a flower trying to have its moment in the sunshine. I have posted about this issue before: vegie guilt. Knowing that when you harvest crops you're cutting down a growing plant in the beauty of its adolescence, denying it the chance to live out a full life as an adult, flowering plant. It's a tragic, yet guiltily delicious, story that isn't all that different from the fate of little lambs and piglets. |
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| A simple flower, yes, but complexity in flowers is sometimes a bit overrated, especially when you have lots of simple blooms. |
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| The final stage is the disappearance of the tightly clumped flowerhead altogether, when the broccoli briefly becomes a shrub with a frazzled spray of white tassels. The bees love the broccoli blooms; there's a humming soundtrack to accompany the show. |
