Allotment Life: Brassica Bed

I did this and wrote this in September and it has been sitting on my draft pile for a while. I keep falling in and out of love with blogging, but decided to keep up with it so that I have my own reference guide for the allotment throughout the year.

My first attempt at a brassica cage has been a mixed success. It certainly protected the crop from pigeon attack but the squares on the mesh were big enough to let butterflies in! The crop mostly escape butterfly damage but some of the leaves were chomped, so the mesh reduced the number that got through but didn’t stop them entirely. Slugs were the main culprit for leaf damage.

Despite all that, I had a healthy crop of six decently sized broccoli heads which were well received by neighbours both at home and on the plot. I don’t eat broccoli much I must admit, I much prefer cauliflower.

The cauliflowers all started off so promising but basically ended up rotting on the plant. The stench was absolutely foul. I think it was a mix of slug & snail activity, rotting plant, and rotting bug stench. They all got ripped out and dumped on the compost, so no cauliflower harvest was had this year.

The cabbages were mixed. I had one good, solid, red cabbage heart which was slugged but I cut the worst off and it is ok. The rest were too far slugged to be worth saving so they went straight to compost too.

The sprouts have been a bit slow to develop but are looking a lot better than last years! I tied the stalks up to the cage as they were flopping all over the place. They are the only large plant of this year left in the cage now. I am just waiting for the sprouts to get bigger and then I can start picking them. Most of them are bitesize.

So I have started to plant next years crops in there already; we have a glut of brassicas at home waiting to be planted so I just bunged some in the cage as there is room. This bed and compost were entirely new earlier this summer so I am counting this all as one crop, rather than two – this means I am ignoring crop rotation best practice and am making the most of a clear bed, with fresh pear-free compost, and a ready-built anti-pigeon cage.

The nasturtium at the back are taking over so I am leaving them to flower for another couple of weeks but I will be removing these soon to give the new brassicas room to grow without being smothered. It’s been a great year for nasturtium this year, they are utterly taking over.