Crops in focus: brassicas

Which are what most people are harvesting now. I still have exactly one floret of purple sprouting broccoli, so I hope the rest hurries up a bit. First to clarify a confusion: broccoli is an over-wintered crop but calabrese produces its crop the same year, before the winter. Both are brassicas as are cabbage, kale and cauliflower - and they are all part of the mustard family, oddly enough.

The ideal brassica bed needs both nitrogen and humus so the addition of manure in autumn will accomplish both. Dig over the soil and then add a barrow load of manure per square metre to the land. Leave the manure over the winter to give the worms a chance to take some down into the soil. But because adding the manure will have had the effect of making the soil more acid and because brassicas don’t like acidity, it’s best to test pH to measure the acidity and add the appropriate amount of lime to take the level up to 7.0.

Seeds are usually sown in spring, planted out in early summer to give a crop the following February/March through to May. There are early, mid-season and late varieties if you want a long harvest. Wind rock can damage the plants, especially through the winter, so try to find a sheltered site, earthing up around the stems for several inches keeps the plant stable and you may want to stake the tallest varieties – we certainly do!

You’ll also want to keep them netted, pigeons will go for the young plants especially in winter when other food is scarce. Broccoli is a slow-growing crop and it may benefit from a liquid feed, high in nitrogen, in the spring as the heads begin to form.

All brassicas are at risk of clubroot, caused by a soil borne organism which produces cysts which lurk in the soil until a suitable host is available to infect, starting the cycle again. The cysts can live for 8 or 9 years. Even worse, it is easily spread. The first sign is a wilting of plants, especially in dry weather. The roots have swellings and look knobbly. If you have a clubroot problem - start your brassicas off in modules using sterile compost to which you’ve added a small amount of lime – keep potting on until they reach 5 inch pots. Clubroot thrives best in acid wet soils so ensure your brassica bed is well dug with grit or other material to allow free drainage and take the pH up to 7.5 or even as high as 8.5 by adding lime Before planting, dig a hole at least 30cm deep and wide which you dust with lime to whiten the soil in the hole. Fill the hole with bought in multi-purpose compost and then plant your brassica in this. And burn your brassica plants when you’ve harvested, so you don’t return any clubroot to the soil.

Labels: allotment-brassicas, allotment-broccoli, allotment-crops

Winter colour on allotments

What colour would you call this path? I have to say that when I saw it last week I felt a bit … dazzled? It just seems too garish for an allotment, to me at least. Still, it’s not my path so I don’t have to worry about it.













On the other hand, a colour I’m particularly happy to see is this lovely shade of purple which is glowing gently from the brassica corner – my purple Brussels sprouts didn’t blow at all and look lovely, tightly-budded little beauties that they are. I wonder why though? Do they take up nitrogen better than the green ones or perhaps they need less of it? I have no idea why they stayed as tight as buttons while the green Brussels sprouts with which they are inter-planted went off in big rose-like blowing frenzies. Does anybody else know what the answer is?

I’ll tell you what though, that dried blood did the trick. Once I’d picked off all the blown sprouts (and stir fried them, waste not, want not!) and sprinkled dried blood and watered it in (and what a stinking job that is) the sprouts higher up the green Brussels stems are just as unblown as the purple ones. Lesson learned for next year: stake better, lime more, and ensure that if they start to blow I take remedial action on day one.

I suspect that to keep the colour in the purple Brussels they will need to be steamed rather than boiled, so I might try a test run this weekend when I go up to get some more Jerusalem artichokes to make soup. I want to have purple vegetables on our Christmas dinner table, and I’m hoping for both purple sprouting broccoli and purple Brussels sprouts. The first broccoli floret has appeared, so the timing is looking good.

Still no frost to kill off the whitefly though … but lots of rain to wash them away. And we lifted our bean frame this week, so that we can put it in its new location once we’ve manured the soil where it’s going to go. If it every stops raining, we might be able to get on with things a bit!

Labels: allotment-brassicas, allotment-brussels-sprouts, allotment-paths, allotment-whitefly

Jerusalem Artichokes, brassicas and parsnips

These are our ‘overflow’ parsnips – we didn’t have enough space to plant all the parsnips we wanted, so we stuck in a row along the front of our runner beans, knowing that the soil wasn’t ideal (nor was the position, the leaves went over the path and got walked on a lot, and they were a nuisance to step over to get to the beans – most of the bean pods we failed to harvest were low growing ones we couldn’t find amongst the parsnip leaves) and they have come up rather forked but we’re still happy with them, as we haven’t even begun to harvest the ‘real’ parsnips in their properly prepared bed. Hope they are a bit straighter!

Steve Godley emailed thus: I have a block of brassicas containing brussels sprouts, cabbages, cauliflowers and curly kale. It is netted with ½” mesh netting against the pigeons but everything is covered with whitefly. At home in the garden I watch the bluetits and their friends searching through the treetops for similar insects I have just set some 2” wire mesh on two sides of the enclosure in the hope that smaller birds (bluetits and the like) will get in and feast on the whitefly. Has anyone already tried this? Or is there another way to get rid of whitefly?

Well, the only remedy I’ve found for whitefly is soapy water sprayed on at regular intervals. I know that all the gardening books say that whitefly does little or no harm to a plant, but a proper infestation will definitely stop the brassica growing properly, and it is horrible to have to wash thousands of flies (and eggs) off the convoluted leaves of something like curly kale. What we need is a good frost to kill the little blighters off, but no sign of that so far.

Jerusalem artichokes – the jury is still out, but the jury foreperson (me) is inclining towards a ‘guilty’ verdict. They definitely to induce wind, which is rather embarrassing if you spend all day with the public, as Himself does, but also, we weren’t thrilled by the flavour. I cooked three or four in a beef casserole and the results were truly flatulent. We’ll try twice more and if we don’t like them any better the third time, we will not be eating them again!

Labels: allotment-brassicas, allotment-jerusalem-artichokes, allotment-parsnips, allotment-whitefly

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

Brassica update

Well my caterpillar squidging, disgusting though it was at the time, seems to have done the trick – although our brassicas are still being attacked a bit by slugs, the wholesale onslaught launched by caterpillars was stopped by my return attack and now it’s probably too late in the season for a further massacre, although I did notice one lorn Cabbage White fluttering around the plot when I was up there yesterday.

Things we’ve learned from this:

1. Netting brassicas is vital if you want to keep your crop alive and that netting has to be tall enough to allow the brassicas to grow at least until mid September. Ours was a bit too low and had to be taken off about ten days to a fortnight early. It also needs to be far enough away so that the brassicas can’t grow out to it sideways or up to it vertically because if they do the pesky butterflies will still manage to find the tiny section pressing against the net to lay eggs on.
2. There is no effective organic caterpillar treatment apart from slaughtering by hand – Derris dust is apparently no longer on the market (although you seem to be able to buy it online?) and other alternatives are not organic.
3. It’s heartbreaking to nearly lose a well-established crop, much worse even than having seedlings eaten by slugs or pulled up by birds.

The picture shows unnetted and netted brassicas next to each other. Although the ones that were netted have been nibbled by slugs, they aren’t showing anything like the damage done by the caterpillars on their unnetted neighbours.

Labels: allotment-brassicas, allotment-caterpillar, allotment-netting

Allotment haul 7 September 2009

The weather is definitely Indian summery – torrid wouldn’t be strong a word for it – although it will break very soon. As we have seedling swede and freshly-sown mooli, I am having to head up to the plot every second day to water.
I’ve also spent an entire Sunday doing the most disgusting thing in the world: squashing caterpillars. It is really gross – but if you want to be organic (or as organic as you can be) in your gardening habits, the only way to deal with cabbage whites is to pull on your gloves hunt down every crawler and squeeze them swiftly and firmly so that they expire instantly.

And because I am a wimp, I always let things get too bad before I intervene. I try to find all the eggs and squash them instead of the poor bugs, but one always misses a few (or a lot, when it’s that time of year when so much needs to be picked and weeded and mowed and pruned) and those few seem to multiply until you are left with lacy brassicas.

We cut some sunflowers, leaving plenty for the birds to harvest, and pulled the first celeriac (just tennis ball sized) and the first parsnip, to test their growth. Both were very good roasted in tinfoil with Chioggia beetroot, fresh rosemary and a sprinkle of balsamic vinegar. Which more or less made up for the brassica destruction and the caterpillar destruction that followed. It’s a ruthless business, this allotment lark.

Labels: allotment-brassicas, allotment-celeriac, allotment-parsnips, allotment-sunflowers

Allotment pests and prettiness

This is not plot 201. This is the allotment of somebody with a developed aesthetic sense and a rightful focus on beauty as well as productivity.

201 has an arch too. Or rather, it has two blue metal shop fittings that are supposed to be the uprights of an arch, when we bury them either side of the path and sling some plastic trellis over the top to make the ‘arch’ bit. For the past eight months or so, they have been moved around the site, from place to place, with people constantly falling over, or into, them and then cursing and kicking them and moving them somewhere else.

The net result of our ‘feed the masses’ ethic is eleven cucumbers in the fridge and no arch. I think we’ve got our priorities a little bit wrong somewhere, but there never seems to be time to stop and work on non-food-crop related things now.

To start with, we have whitefly on everything, but mainly on the brassicas that aren’t in the brassica cage. And while whitefly are said to be more a nuisance than a pest, we still have to wash them off all our seedling plants every few days. The distinction between ‘nuisance’ and ‘pest’ seems to be that nuisances annoy and make work harder, while pests simply destroy and make work fruitless (or cropless, if you prefer). The tomatoes seem to insist on being tied up every ten minutes, the beans don’t seem to be flowering as fast or as much as himself would wish (and the runner beans are attacked by blackfly) and the celeriac can’t get enough water. With all that going on, who has time to stop and consider a rustic arch?

But I didn’t get an allotment just to have kilos of crops that have to be blanched or dried or pickled or given away. I got an allotment to have scope to express myself in plants as well as in words – but on the current evidence I have about as much ‘green’ creativity as the average bus timetable. I think my autumn focus needs to be on beauty …

Labels: allotment-arch, allotment-beans, allotment-brassicas, allotment-celeriac, allotment-cucumber

Allotment winter crops and summer preparation

So the cage is ready and the kale is in it and the purple sprouting broccoli will go in too, this weekend. The Brussels sprouts are outside it though. Why? Because even Cabbage Whites don’t seem at all attracted to Brussels sprouts. We have both red Brussels and green ones, as you can see.

Sometimes aphids will land on Brussels, but if you wash them off with the hose they never seem to come back, unlike on other plants where the infestations are almost unending. Add to the pest-free element the fact that Brussels sprouts don’t need a lot of care, just regular watering and hand-weeding because they have shallow roots. You don’t even have to feed them, because if you do give them too rich a soil the sprouts simply ‘blow’ and become leafy. You may need to stake them (note in the photo that we staked ours from planting out, because Sussex by the Sea is noted for its winter gales and damned if I’m going to try and get stakes in the ground in October and risk damaging the roots on my lovely brassicas, when advance planning allowed me to get the stakes sorted out in May!) if you live in a windy area.

You can pinch out the top of the Brussels in September, which is what those growers do who have started producing Brussels ‘canes’ that turn up in supermarkets with all the little sprouts still on the stem. If you don’t pinch out the top, the sprouts will mature at different times, if you do pinch out, then all the sprouts tend to be ready at once. If you have a big family and want sprouts for Christmas, pinch out some tops in September to guarantee a full stem of sprouts for dinner in December. If you don’t have a big family, leave the tops in and you can harvest over a much longer period. Or, if you’re like me, and adore Brussels Sprouts, do some of both.

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

Allotment structures: the brassica cage

Now a lot of people will tell you that brassicas are more trouble than they’re worth, but don’t you believe them! It’s glorious to have fresh, tasty winter vegetables when the weather is harsh and the shops are full of overpriced, tasteless, boring veggies.

There are a few problems – getting the soil right and the long growing season to name but two, but the worst, for us, is pests. The Cabbage White butterfly is called that because it loves cabbages, although it has no objection to other brassicas as far as I can see. And it’s not the butterfly that’s the issue, but the caterpillars, which hatch from small eggs laid on the undersides of leaves and which hatch with a ravenous desire to eat your brassicas down to the stump.

You can check the leaves and pick off the eggs, but we’ve never found this effective, and this year, due to me suddenly having major surgery, I’m really glad that we put in the effort (okay, Himself put in the effort) to build a brassica cage. The cage will keep off the pigeons as well as the butterflies, so it’s an all year round device. And it means that we don't have to do the time-consuming 'inspect and remove' thing with the eggs.

And here it is, in its first phase. Himself made the panels at home and lined them with 7 millimetre netting before taking them down to the allotment and assembling it there.













Second phase is a bit like putting together a three dimensional jigsaw that weighs a lot more than we’d expected. There was some cursing and counter-cursing at this point.












Finished article: which is substantial and easy to get around in. We could have got one of those cages made of aluminium poles and netting, but it’s a windy site and over the past year we saw quite a few of those lying on their sides after some of Sussex’s more demanding gales, so we went for something a bit more castle-like! It is portable, to avoid the risks inherent in not rotating crops, but strong enough to withstand weather.














And here it is with Ragged Jack kale in it. On the other side of the plank path we've put dwarf green kale and the other winter crop we’ll put in it will be purple-sprouting broccoli, which has been prone to butterfly infestation on our site, and next year we hope to be organised enough to put cabbages and cauliflowers inside too.

Labels: allotment-brassica-cage, allotment-brassicas, allotment-butterflies

Growing brassicas from seed

It seems utterly ridiculous to be sowing brassicas now, but they are crops that need a very long growing season so getting them off to a start now is important. We’ve got seeds of red Brussels sprouts, green Brussels sprouts, Ragged Jack kale, standard kale and winter cabbage so we hope that next winter we'll have a harvest like this one…

All brassicas give of their best in a partially-shaded spot with fertile, free-draining soil – but we also find they need extremely firm roots – especially Brussels sprouts, because if they start to rock in the winter winds, they don’t do at all well!

1. Brassica seedlings germinate in eight to ten days but won’t be ready for transplanting for six to eight weeks so there’s still time to get the ground ready by raking over the surface and adding a general-purpose fertiliser. We then walk all over the soil to trample out air pockets and really firm the surface. For the last seven to ten days you need to harden off greenhouse raised seedlings and get them used to the ‘real’ weather conditions.
2. Transplanting is a bit of a bugger because you need to water the seedlings and then lift them very carefully, keeping as much soil as possible around the roots – that’s why a lot of people try to sow single seeds in modules so they can be removed easily.
3. All brassicas need to be water again after planting and kept well watered while they get established. Hand weeding is best as hoeing can disturb the roots and lead to the wind rock that makes the plants less productive.

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

Allotment Crops in Season: Kale

This is a wonderful plant, it’s as tough as old boots when growing, and as tender as spinach when harvested! It can withstand the kind of temperatures we’ve got right now, ie freezing and then some, and it doesn’t have the pest problems that other brassicas do.

Sow kale seed in April to June in modules. Once the seedlings are established (say six to eight weeks, it’s a long process) you can move them to their final position, spacing them in rows about 45cm apart. The good news is that kale is much more forgiving than other brassicas and puts up with almost any soil that has reasonable drainage although it does best in a relatively sunny spot – this means you can stick it in where peas, early potatoes or other early summer crops have finished their work. Just remove any weeds and rake a small amount of fertiliser over the top. Not digging allows the roots to get nice and firm, which is what all brassicas like. Water during dry patches and keep weeded. It’s a good idea to walk heavily around the base of the stem every week to firm it, which stops larger varieties swaying and breaking their tiny roots. Most kale won’t need staking.

You can harvest from September for early varieties to May for late ones. The trick is, with curly kale, to start at the crown, cutting a few young leaves each time with sharp knife or a sharp downwards tug. This encourages the production of side shoots which can be harvested between February and May when they are 10 to 12cm long.

Labels: allotment-brassicas, allotment-kale

Allotment Bird Scarers

Not the best photograph in the world, but you can see the problem. At this time of year, when food is scarce, the disgruntled allotment-holder finds him or herself fighting with birds.

Now the crow, bless him, is really not the problem. He turns up from time to time and will hop down ponderously to snaffle a bit of bacon sandwich, but really he’s not that interested in pecking our broad beans, that’s the pigeons.

And this is the scaraweb!

I ‘scored’ this off freecycle at the end of last year, and while it looks like a crash-landing by Santa, it does seem to be working – also, it’s biodegradable.

The problem with any bird scarer is that birds soon get used to it. You can try:




• Toy snakes (should be more than two feet long)
• Toy cats
• CDs on strings
• Bottles on canes
• Bunting
• Windmills
• Plastic shopping bags tied to string


But any and all of these only work because the birds are surprised and uncertain. As soon as they get used to the whatever-it-is then they’ll be back, pecking the tops out of beans and peas and taking the sprouts off Brussels. So what you have to do, apparently, is change your bird scarer system every couple of days so that there’s a constant novelty to the process. I assume this means that by the end of the week your resident birds will have forgotten what they saw on your plot at the beginning of the week, so they have a longer memory than goldfish, but not by much. Our fellow allotment-holders have a plethora of devices, so I’m going to photograph them and share them with you over the weeks ahead …

Labels: allotment-bird-scarers, allotment-birds, allotment-brassicas, allotment-broad-beans, allotment-pests

November – no end to allotment tasks!

I don’t quite understand why, when everybody else seems to be winding down, and Soilman has even gone into hibernation, I seem to be getting busier!

Partly it’s because the days are so short now, that I’m lucky to get half an hour of gloom on the allotment when I’ve finished my ‘real’ work, so everything seems to take forever to get done, and partly it’s because a new allotment, particularly one that’s been neglected, just has so much that needs to be done.

So far we’ve:

1. sort of sorted the shed – more to be done in Spring, but it’s at least watertight now
2. begun to restore the cold frame – or at least, Tony has, while I just make admiring noises
3. cleared about a tenth of the runners, slugs, bindweed and thistles from the strawberry bed – that’s my job, and horrible, fiddly, backbreaking work it is too
4. started to clear the brick path – very satisfying, especially as it means less risk of slipping on something slimy and end up on your a**e!
5. laid some shuttering to make new paths – again, very satisfying, it gives the allotment a sense of structure.

What we haven’t begun on yet is:

1. mending dodgy fence posts
2. laying a new hardstanding
3. cutting back the holly tree
4. moving the compost bins
5. refixing the entire far end fence which is now leaning against the rest of the fence, looking pathetic
6. any planting
7. any digging.

If we had brassicas this year then this is also what I’d be doing:

1. keeping my Brussels sprouts, purple sprouting broccoli and kale tidy and weed-free, and staking the outer Brussels against wind damage
2. sowing broad beans is something I’ve already done on Duncan’s allotment, although how many will come up, given that we appear to have mice, is anybody’s guess.

I wonder if things will slow down in December ...?

Labels: allotment-brassicas, allotment-fences, allotment-paths, allotment-tasks-november

Allotment rain – at last, and tasks

Whee! After six weeks of nothing, our first real rain! Sadly, it’s accompanied by howling gales but you can’t have everything. At least our brassicas and lettuce will be getting a real soaking.

And at last we can stop going up every evening to water the peas. Our crop is going to be feeble anyway, we had only half a dozen pea plants and they got horribly wind-scorched before we got the windbreak up, but peas are, to me, the Faberge egg of allotment life – without peas fresh from the pod, the summer’s wasted. Of course we will need to go up again and check their supports, as this kind of wind could knock even a wrought iron terrace flat. They are just about ready for harvesting, so I’m keeping a very beady eye on them.

We’re also watching our radishes, which should be benefitting from this cool weather. We sowed another row last week and they are already showing two leaves, but I always think you can’t have too many radishes (and if you do, you can make cold radish soup, which is called poor man’s gazpacho in our house). As radishes will bolt if it gets too hot, we’re relatively pleased that this sowing is starting off in cool weather, as one school of thought argues that bolting behaviour is not just triggered by hot weather at the time, but may be a predisposition of hot weather at the time of germination. They only need water in July, never feeding.

And at the end of the month we’ll be sowing winter radish, spreading out the sowing period from late July to early September to ensure a supply over a long timeframe.

Labels: allotment-brassicas, allotment-lettuce, allotment-peas, allotment-radishes

New allotments – slug damage

How everybody hates the slug (except hedgehogs perhaps) and how little there is you can do about the beast! I lost one of my celery plants to slugs yesterday and at least six of the brassicas Duncan put in have been eaten back to the stem in a single night – not much chance of any of them surviving. Not all the brassicas are labelled and some went in before we became co-workers, so I’m guessing from the stems what these were and I think they were purple sprouting broccoli, a particular favourite of mine, which makes it even more annoying.

The usual routes for slug prevention are slug pellets or slug traps. The former is simple but works out as quite an expense if you have to ‘protect’ an entire allotment and may harm wildlife. The latter is cheaper but time-consuming and if, like me, you’re fastidious (not a good allotment trait) it becomes increasingly horrible to empty the drowned slugs out of the traps and refill them.

Another route is the nematode, a parasitic creature of microscopic size that is watered into the soil where it searches out slugs and creeps inside them (think of the alien inside John Hurt in the film Alien and you’ve got the picture). Once inside, the nematode releases a bacterium which it feeds on and as that bacterium multiplies, the slug dies. The nematodes multiply inside the slug and within 3-5 days the slug stops feeding and will burrow underground to die. As the slug decomposes in the soil, the nematodes are released back into the soil to search out more slugs. I’m thinking we might have to order some.

Here’s the problem though – a lot of our plot is covered in black planting membrane through which holes have been cut for the seedlings – I can’t find any information about whether nematodes will work in those circumstances. Normally you water them across the whole growing area with a watering can and they burrow down into the soil – so will it work if you just pour the nematode water through the small holes in the black plastic? I don’t know, and nobody seems to be able to tell me.

Labels: allotment-brassicas, allotment-celery, allotment-nematode, allotment-slug