After overnight rain Sunday took until lunchtime to brighten up to give us a bright and breezy afternoon.
Back in March I bought a trio of early brassicas from Marshalls seeds. These were cabbage Duncan, calabrese Marathon and cauliflower Mayflower. The cabbages and calabrese produced some good crops which we finished picking a few weeks ago. When the cauliflowers arrived on the 23 March 2014 they looked like this.
They didn't look the best of specimens and the cabbages and calabrese looked much the same. All the plants were potted on and given some tlc in the greenhouse and the cabbages and calabrese responded well but the cauliflowers were another matter and didn't seem to want to grow at all.
By the 05 May 2014 when the name suggests they should be “cauliflowering” the plants still hadn't done much growing but we decided to plant them out on the plot and see what would happen to them.
I wasn't sure if they would survive or become another meal for the slugs. Surprisingly they survived and after a settling in period started to grow away well. As you can see from the picture below by the 29 June 2014 they'd gone on to produce some excellent plants but up to that point no cauliflowers.
On Sunday we harvested our first cauliflower. I must admit I expected them to be ready before July but it’s a bonus as in May I wasn't expecting them to grow let alone produce any crop.
The Marshalls plants certainly filled a gap producing some early summer brassicas well before the cabbages, calabrese and cauliflowers from my spring sowings. I might even give them a try again next spring.
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A lovely cauliflower. I planted out six sprout plants today. I do love brassicas, but the pests put me off. I've covered them with enviromesh, so we shall see what happens. If I could grow cauliflowers like that I'd be very happy, but they always look a bit tricky.
ReplyDeleteThe trouble with cauliflowers is that they all mature together. We'll have 15 ready this week.
DeleteThe enviromesh should keep most of the brassica pests at bay.