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.

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