Allotment problems – blown sprouts

Just to prove it never rains but it pours, we’ve got blown sprouts. It seems there could be two causes, either wind rocking or lack of nutrients – and the result is that the sprouts open up like a flower, instead of staying tightly budded.

It seems that if we remove the blown sprouts and feeding with a fertiliser high in nitrogen, it can stop the problem, allowing the sprouts further up the plant to develop properly. I do have a good recipe for blown sprouts, which is a stir-fry with orange and ginger and sesame oil, so that’s okay, but the liquid fertiliser is a bit of a swine. The only way I could work out to do it was to used dried blood (which is organic and high in nitrogen) and then water it in well, because I couldn’t find any organic liquid fertilisers that weren’t equally N-P-K. I hope it works. Dried blood, if you’ve never used it, is about the vilest smelling substance on the face of the planet.

So I sprinkled dried blood around all the brassicas, not just the Brussels Sprouts amd watered it in on Thursday - I shall have to restake the sprouts tomorrow. And there I was, smugly thinking we were almost on top of our allotment task list for the first time this year!

Labels: allotment-blown-sprouts, allotment-brassicas, allotment-brussels sprouts