The Great Brussels Sprout Experiment, Part 2

It feels like much, much longer ago, but about three weeks ago, I broke off many of the leaves on our Brussels sprouts plants to encourage the buds to fill out to an edible size. I also fertilized, watered, and gave a little love to these plants. The only other thing we did for them between then and now is added a hoop house over them to keep them from freezing and to try to encourage them to grow, even though the season really ought to be over.

Our Brussels sprouts were nowhere near ready for Thanksgiving dinner, so we bought some from Tendercrop. As a point of comparison, here's what they look like when grown by people who know what they are doing:


And here's what ours looked like as of today:


Not at all impressive, although a few are plumping up here and there. the best ones are on the small stalk that I accidentally beheaded while pulling the leaves off a few weeks ago:


Looking at this one — the one that I was pretty sure would die without any leaves left when I broke it — made me think that my mistake all along was not removing enough leaves to encourage the buds to grow. Maybe they all need to go?  Well, this is an experiment anyway, so I pulled off all the rest of the leaves this morning:


This is what is left. I also fertilized and watered again, and then left the hoop wide open for some air circulation. It's been a freakishly warm weekend again, but it probably won't help much now that there are so few hours of daylight to be had. I'm pretty sure that we won't see many decent-sized Brussels sprouts this year, but I think we've learned a lot about this weird vegetable from this first try. Next year we'll plant it about a month earlier, strip the leaves more aggressively, and fertilize it more regularly.

AND I'll stay vigilant about the cabbage loopers. Even after the cold evening temps, look what I found sunning itself in the hoop house:


How is this even still alive? And how is it still trying to crawl back towards the Brussels sprouts after I threw it on the brick path?

I hate these guys.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What to Do With an Unripe Watermelon

Image
Back on the first weekend of August we were so excited to see how big our watermelons were getting. We checked all the signs of ripeness: good sound, firm skin, yellow bottom. So Kirk brought one in: And we sliced it open: Shit. This is not meant to be a yellow watermelon. It only even looks that way in the photo because of the lighting — it's really white throughout. It's Sweet Favorite, and it's supposed to be red.  After the huge wave of disappointment rolled through the room, we all took a bite anyway.  It's not sweet, but it's not sour or bitter, either. It tastes like watermelon, just without the sugar. Kind of like a watermelon-flavored cucumber. It's too big to let go to waste, and we felt obligated to wrap it up and keep it in the fridge until we figured out something to with it.   Dish #1: Watermelon Kachumber Kachumber is an Indian salad that is normally made with cucumber. Here we used some of our unripe w
Read more

So Where's Everybody From?

Image
I don't have any new garden pictures or updates for you today. I have to say, it's getting kind of hard to get a good photo during the one hour of waning daylight left by the time I get home from work. These are the darkest days now, as we hurtle toward the solstice. Without any photos for me to share with you today, I thought it would be a good time to ask: Where're y'all from? If you have never kept a blog of your own, you might not know that the writer of one gets a bunch of stats about who has hit on the webpage. Most of it's not very interesting: I don't care how many of you use your iPhone vs. a PC or what browser you use to surf the web. The one interesting part, though, is the map . Blogger keeps track of what country readers are in when they check out my page. It's fascinating! Here's my readership map for November: I figured my readers were mostly my Facebook friends, and I know where they are. But now my list of countries is gettin
Read more

Last Weekend of Winter

Image
It's the last weekend of winter! Next weekend we'll be beyond the equinox, and the days will be ever-so-slightly longer than the nights.  We still have snow on the ground, lots of wind, and temperatures in the 30s, but we plowed ahead with our almost-spring garden chores anyway. Here's what we did this weekend: 1. Got the chickens out on the raised bed where to prep the soil for planting greens: 2. Poked around the greenhouse tunnels to harvest the last veggies: parsnips and a couple leeks, plus a few leftover fall cabbages for the chickens (which they were very  excited about). We do still have some spinach, mache and kale left as well, but not much. 3. Improved the maple sugaring set-up by building a bigger firebox: Kirk used leftover bricks we had lying around to make a floor (so as not to ruin the bricks on our patio), then got nine cinderblocks to make the three walls of the firebox (solid side toward the fire). He also picked up some steel
Read more