How not to grow broccoli? It's dead easy if you pick the wrong time of year. Here's how I did it. First, be lazy and buy a seedling, instead of seed. Then plant the seedling in autumn, right at the start of an unusually warm stretch of weather. Fertilise normally. Stand back! Here's what happens next...
Too late for harvest already. This broccoli head went from
normal 'broccoli' to flower head in a matter of days. We
blinked and missed our chance to harvest our crop.
"Don't touch the broccoli!" our resident artist (Pammy) warned
our resident gardener (me). Like someone glued to the TV
screen watching a soap opera, she wanted to see what happened
next. (Besides, might make a nice painting later on.)
Each little blob-ette in a head of broccoli is a flower trying
to have its moment in the sunshine. I have posted about this
issue before: vegie guilt. Knowing that when you harvest crops
you're cutting down a growing plant in the beauty of its
adolescence, denying it the chance to live out a full life as an adult,
flowering plant. It's a tragic, yet guiltily delicious, story that isn't
all that different from the fate of little lambs and piglets.
A simple flower, yes, but complexity in flowers is sometimes
a bit overrated, especially when you have lots of simple blooms.
The final stage is the disappearance of the
tightly clumped flowerhead altogether, when
the broccoli briefly becomes a shrub with
a frazzled spray of white tassels. The bees love
the broccoli blooms; there's a humming
soundtrack to accompany the show.
