Gardeners Tips

Good, firm, mild flavoured Brussels Sprouts are a heavy yielding crop that only need a bit of care and consideration. Here are our top tips.

Correct Growing Techniques

• F1 seeds will give the best results. It is a case of you get what you pay for. Cheap Brussels Sprouts seeds often lead to open pollinated varieties that fail to justify the time and space utilised.
• Firm almost packed soil is appreciated by Brussels Sprouts. Draw some soil up around 10″ of the stem in late summer to prevent wind rock or tie plants to a firm stake. Open loose soil encourages blown. ‘fluffy’ sprouts.
• Wet seasons can lead to foliage loss and leaf disease. Plant 12-18″ apart or wider on an open site to reduce the severity of infection. Water in summer if there is a drought.
• Where white blister and ringspot diseases are severe choose resistant varieties like Dimitri, Cronus,  & Bosworth.
• This year I am trying Burbane and Rudolph from Kings seeds.

Pests and Other Problems

• Whitefly, caterpillars and aphids can be a problem mid season. It is no fun if they get into the buttons. Cold weather cures these problems but failing that I treat plants with a mild insecticide.
• Yellow fungus infected rotting leaves can’t be treated with any garden approved fungicide. Pull off any affected leaves and bin them.
• As with other brassicas their is a danger of club root that is best solved by crop rotation into fresh soil improving drainage and adding lime. I have heard of planting the sprouts with a rhubarb leaf as a prophylactic.
• Frost can be both good and bad. Young plants need to be planted mid summer well after any frost but stalks can stand into winter and are sweeter if frosted first.
• Old sprouts can have an odor caused by compounds containing sulfur. This may be the cause of sprouts falling out of favour in some kitchens until new varieties were discovered.

Varieties & Variations of Brussels Sprouts

• Top Eight F1 varieties include  Brendan, Trafalgar, Crispus. Nautic, Bridget, Brodie, Maximus F1 and Hastings.
• Flower sprouts are the result of crossing a Brussels Sprout and curly Kale resulting in tasty small green and purple sprouts with curly leaves ideal for adding to stir fries.
• Older varieties of Brussels Sprouts have the best flavour, but it is the modern hybrids which have the ability to hold the small tight buttons for a long time on the stem.
• Red Brussels Sprouts  deepen in colour as the weather gets colder. Red Bull produces medium sized buttons with an unusual nutty flavour. The colour reverts to green when cooking. Red Ball is hardy and has a long cropping season.

Harvesting Brussels Sprouts

• Take the buttons from the bottom of the stalk first.
• Take off blown or flowering sprouts and any yellowing leaves as you go.
• Cut off the whole stalk and use the sprouts indoors as you need them. They keep better on the stalk.
• The top of the stalk can be eaten like a small cabbage

Early Spring Rhubarb breaking Through

What Does Rhubarb Mean to You

• Rhubarb is a vegetable that thinks it is a fruit and has royal pretensions with top varieties called Victoria and Early Albert
• Rhubarb Rhubarb Rhubarb is an indistinct chant  or none sense word shouted out in an unsynchronised manner at a public event.
• ‘A rhubarb’ is baseball slang for a fight or argument among players.
•   “Stop talking rhubarb”. Complete and utter balderdash and b*****s.
• Stewed or in a pie it is the food of gods. Even raw with the stick end just dipped in a little sugar – gear nosh.
• Already his year I have had Rhubarb flavoured gin and a special cider flavoured as Rhubarb and custard.
• According to some ‘Its very name means “food of the barbarians” the people who live beyond the Rha, now the river Volga’.
• To some less fortunate Rhubarb is a strong purgative.

In Praise of Growing Rhubarb

• It is one of the earliest crops in the garden.
• It can be forced into even earlier cropping if kept in the dark with a bit of warmth eg from a straw wrapper in an upturned bucket. The stems will then be thin, blanched pink and juicy.
• Rhubarb is hardy and if fed and watered will produce for many years.
• The big leaves are easy to compost. Even though they contain Oxalic acid they do no harm in the compost heap.

Young Stems

Here in Oxford, we tried sowing some Kale in the middle of August.

We sowed some directly into pots and as an after thought sowed some directly into the ground.

Going on holiday for two weeks after sowing seeds is always asking for trouble, and by the time we got back they had shriveled up and were only good for the compost heap. However, the seeds sown direct into the ground did quite well. A few got eaten by slugs but a couple grew fast enough to escape their clutches.

The location in the garden wasn’t the best, with shade from Conifer and other trees limited the amount of direct sun, as Autumn progressed, they were lucky to get one hour of sun per day. Yet, despite little direct sunlight, they kept growing and soon started to encroach on each other. We started picking some leaves from the bottom of the plants and got a few meals out of them.

As the nights shortened, growth slowed down almost to a stop and the Kale pests seemed to be taking out more than they were able to grow. I think later damage came from pigeons or the like, it doesn’t look like the work of slugs – too big and neat.

Anyway, they look OK, in the mostly empty border and were a good ground-cover as we await a new fence. The last few straggly plants will be harvested and will make the odd meal or two.

But, for late sowing, they didn’t get enough sunlight to really get going – even the richest soil can’t compensate for lack of light. But, next year, we’ll pick a better spot and hope that they really take off. We may also try a later sowing because Kale is a good plant for providing fresh veg through the winter months. However, we may have to take pest control a bit more seriously which will mean netting to stop both butterflies and pigeons – so maybe not in the flower border.

Here’s a useful post on growing organic Kale.

Related posts at Gardenerstips

• Ornamental Kale

There are over 7000 different varieties of apple tree including those classed as eaters, cookers, crab or cider apples. 10% of these are available from RHS plant finder recommended nurseries.

Horticultural Considerations

• Your apple tree should last a long time and be fruitful and satisfying. It is worth taking care to get the selection right.
• The growth and size of your tree will depend to a large extent on the ‘rootstock’. The most common rootstocks are M27 5-6 feet tall, M26 8-12 feet tall and MM106 12-18 feet tall.
• Some varieties of apple in clay based soil may grow slightly quicker and larger than an apple planted on light, sandy or chalky soil.
• Most apple trees need another cultivar to pollinate their flowers and set fruit. It must flower at the same time. Triploid trees are very poor pollinators.
• Some varieties are more disease resistant than others. Seek out award of garden merit AGM varieties or discuss with a specialist nursery.

Personal Selection Criteria

• Warm country imports from supermarkets often have less flavour than your home grown apples.
• Autumn apple days are held around the country and can offer a wealth of local advice. Sample tasting may be possible or you can select trusted well known favourites.
• How you want to grow your tree can affect the selection. A trained espalier tree or cordon grown on a slant, a ballerina tree grown in a large pot or a ‘step over hedge’ tree are currently popular in designer gardens. The choice is yours but plan now for planting later this autumn.
• Two year old trees will cost more but crop sooner than maidens.

Mild-flavored winter radish usually characterized by fast-growing leaves and a long, white fleshy roots

White Radish (Raphanus sativus) Facts

• Seeds of the Daikon, Mooli, Japanese or Oriental Radish are  popular for their pure white roots.
• Generally they have  a crisp mild flavour that won’t go pithy.
• Fully winter hardy they are best grown for autumn and winter production.
• Roots can remain in the ground in good condition over a long period.
• They can be lifted and stored the same as other root crops.
• They produce best in sun and moist, fertile soil.
• Radish do not transplant well but you can try using plugs.

Suppliers

• Long White Icicle is currently on offer from Suttons in support of Cancer Research.
  
• 23 varieties of Asian Radish seeds from evergreenseeds.com
• Or try our link to Thompson & Morgan top right