For those that have some kale, broccoli, cabbage or any other brassica plant growing in the veg garden, you might find these top tips quite useful as we hit late winter.
Protect Brassicas from pigeons now
Brassicas can provide quite the feast for pigeons at this time of year – they are hungry and they love a brassica and there aren’t any young plants for them to attack, so they’ll just go for the more mature plants, including broccoli spears! Pop a net over your plants if you have wood pigeons in your area.
You won’t need to worry about caterpillars until May (ish!)
You can relax a little when it comes to butterflies and caterpillars though, as they don’t normally start their egg laying activity until May. This means you can be a little less extreme with your netting tactics.
Protect Brassicas from slugs and snails
Brassica plants provide a really easy target for slugs and snails at this time of year, especially if there are a lot of older, yellowing leaves lying on the ground. Be sure to remove these regularly, and strip off any leaves on the stalks that are turning yellow so as not to attract slugs. Pop a few beer traps down, or use wool pellets or similar.
When will Purple Sprouting Broccoli start cropping?
You can expect to see the first signs of a broccoli harvest any time from now until April/May – it will depend a little on how mature your plants are. If you planted them back in late summer or early autumn, they will crop a little earlier. If you planted in October, they may be another few weeks – don’t give up on them!
Harvest Cabbages & Sprouts before they start to open
If you haven’t harvested them yet, check the heads to make sure they are still firm and not beginning to open out. Ideally, harvest them all before the first signs of spring, and before the leaves loosen up.
Check leaves for fungal diseases
If you see signs of leaf spot or mildew forming on leaves – particularly those leaves that you eat, like kale – strip them off and get rid of them to try and keep plants healthy. You may find that they bounce back quite well without the disease spreading if you act fast and give them a one-off liquid feed to boost nutrients in the soil.
Mature Cavolo Nero Kale will start to bolt in early spring
Watch out for signs of Cavolo Nero beginning to bolt and form flower heads – try and harvest the bulk of the leaves before that happens so that you can make the most of your plants. This will probably only happen for those plants that went in the ground last spring/summer. If you planted later in autumn, the plants probably haven’t reached maturity yet so you should get a couple more months out of them.