Grow Better Veggies

A wonderful edible flower and bud: the Choys

Here we have a beautiful little flower bud of a pac choy plant.  It's edible and unusually tasty.  The chef has been loving them ever since our older choy plants have sent up a flower spike and have started to blossom.  We like to let a lot of veggies here at Love Apple Farm flower, because most vegetable flowers (particularly winter vegetables) can be eaten.  We also do it to save seed and to feed our bees in the winter time, when flowers are scarce.

This bud though, is equally edible and lovely.  If it reminds you of a tiny broccoli head, then you've got a good eye.  Pac choy, pak choi, bok choy, or however you want to spell it, is a sister of broccoli.  Both are members of the Brassica family.  I think you would find this particular bud, though, quite sweet.  The rest of the plant is wonderfully edible as well, including the stem after it sends up its flower spike.  So don't be shy, eat those greens....all of them!

Transplanting Brassicas with a Little Dog Help

We planted out some Brassicas today: Purple and White Kohlrabi and a bed of Purple Sprouting Broccoli.  Although we've had these growing all winter, and we've been harvesting them for the chef, I am trying to get one more opportunity for these cool-loving crops before the garden gets taken over with the summer plants.  The tray of Purple Sprouting Broccoli above was seeded in our greenhouse about 9 weeks ago, and then pricked out into our small rose pots about 4 weeks ago.  We do an off-set spacing with them in our garden beds, taking maximum advantage of the space by doing so.  Here is what I mean:
Broccoli gets pretty big when mature, so we space them about a foot apart, and start with five across.  The next row's plants are then placed in the middle of the previous, in an off-set (or grid) pattern.  That allows us to place more in each bed.

Since I wanted to give James and Rois as many "farmy" experiences as possible, they were asked to help out popping the seedlings in the ground.  As usual, they cheerfully obliged. 

One of my main tips on transplanting seedlings, is to get them deeper in the ground than they were in the pot.  Don't compact the soil as you back-fill.  We give them just one gentle push to settle the soil around each fragile root-ball.  Looks like the Brits have the technique down:

Our farm dogs, Indy and Trinity, always find lots of opportunities to check out what we're doing and try to horn in on the action.  We're never too busy to give them a quick cuddle before carrying on.

Dogs certainly can make life more interesting, and our dogs are real characters.  I don't think we'd have nearly as much fun around here without them.  Sara always has a smile for a dog eager to distract her from her duties.

Cabbage and Broccoli in January

January's frosty mornings and short day length are no match for the cold loving veggies like broccoli and cabbage.

Savoy Cabbage

Broccoli

This broccoli (below) has whiteflies. Time for some organic pest treatment, pyrethrin spray at dusk (so we don't hurt our honeybees that are out only during the day).

Romanesco Broccoli - A True Objet d'Art

If you think veggies are boring, then you've never seen the likes of Romanesco broccoli.  And if this true marvel of nature doesn't make you wonder what the hell the first George Bush was talking about when he proclaimed that he didn't like broccoli, then you're an incurable Lachanophobe.

See the way each little peak spirals around?  And then notice how each little bunch then spirals around the whole head?  This is called a fractal form, or a self-similar pattern.  There are lots of examples in nature of fractal forms, but I think the Romanesco broccoli is one of the coolest, because you can get right up close to it and admire it for as long as you want, and then you can eat it!

Romanesco broccoli is not really a true broccoli, it's more properly classified as a cauliflower, and a lot of people do know it as such.  I can tell by the way it grows that it's a cauliflower. The plant is much larger than a broccoli - about 3 feet in height when mature - and once the main head is cut, that's it.  You cannot rely on lateral growth for additional minor heads as the season goes on, which is a nice feature of regular broccoli.  However, this beauty is so interesting, with a nice nutty flavor, that it's worth it.

I mean, talk about a great segue at the dinner table.  You could steam this baby whole, present it to your perpetually bored lachanophobic teen-ager, and with any luck, get him to eat his veggies AND start a conversation about molecular nanotechnology.

Now go forth and multiply in a self-similar pattern.  Plant some Romanesco.  Pronto.