Bob Toasting Our First Hefty Broccoli of the year - One of His Favorites!
I’ve spent a lot of time grumbling about how cool and wet the 2010 Seattle spring has been. Last night, I harvested one of the benefits of this weather – big, heavy, super-sweet broccoli! If you’ve only had broccoli from the grocery store, you don’t know what you’re missing. Freshly harvested, home grown broccoli has a fantastic sweetness and a delicious, mineral-infused earthiness that you rarely taste in the bundles sold at the grocery store.
Broccoli does great in cool, wet weather. Plus, cabbage butterfly pests don’t do a lot of flights when it’s pouring rain, so their egg laying has been down this year. (I still row covered this crop for those rare days the sun did come out.) The cool and wet encouraged the broccoli, a cool-season crop, to grow slowly. In warmer years gone by, we’ve struggled with this crop bolting (aka sending up a tiny flower head that immediately opens and provides little food for us.) This year, we’re enjoying a fantastic crop. We haven’t irrigated once and despite being planted very close together in this year’s small brassica bed, the broccoli is doing great.
Earlier in the year, we tested the soil for this bed and determined it required a dose of lime and nitrogen to make it ideal for veggie crops. We added lime and later added blood Meal. This seems to have really done the trick! We’ll be eating a lot of broccoli over the next few weeks – yum!
Have a glut of broccoli in your garden?
Consider making this delicious asian-influence meal we invented for last night’s broccoli bounty. Plus, we used up quite a bit of garlic scapes as well! (more…)
