Planting Broccoli

broccoli plant startsA friend of mine is planting broccoli and was asking, “How far apart?” on FaceBook.

mature broccoli Well here are some pictures of the broccoli in our garden last year. You can see that they do tend to get to be quite large. That doesn’t bother us though, we put them in a row and harvest by going up and down both sides of the row.

broccoli Waltham 29 seed  Honestly, I cheat by scanning the seed packet of anything that we plant. It helps to be able to look up info about whatever we are growing because my head doesn’t store this information very well.broccoli Di Cicco seed

Some people use markers in the garden for all kinds of information. But, I have had to limit the markers to just tell me what I plant in each row. The markers in the garden stand a good chance of being broken, lost, or unreadable so I rely on them to help till I can see what the plants are.broccoli Calabrese seed

Add this ingredient to your repertoire if you are planting any of the “APHID” crops:

Diatomaceous Earth Food Grade

This #50 bag of white powder will make you very happy because it stops those little buggers when they come to eat all of your cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, etc, etc, etc.

Garden Helper

Grandpa & Ben in PumpkinsGarden work with a grandchild, is always fun and a bit educational. Anticipation of the great tasting food almost always makes the work together more fun as it seems to take less time to do with the company. As a family, we really look forward to the garden on the weekends. Any kind of picking is an anticipation to really great tasting food, so it is almost always positive even though it is work. Harvesting isn’t the only thing done on our days off, there is also enough chores to fill two summers with the weeding, trimming, watering, bracing, tilling, composting and more.

This weekend we had a little helper named Ben who is 4 years old. He helped Grandpa find all the pumpkins, there is always a contest on which one do you think will be the biggest one?

Grandpa and Ben Cabbage

Then they picked a big old cabbage even though Ben was sure he would not want to eat it anyhow.

Next was picking corn for dinner. They had to go and husk it in the compost pile. Ben is a strong and great helper for his age.

Grand children are the best. Kind of a second chance at parenting that is so much easier, cause it isn’t all the time. Thank God for children who share their children with their parents!