It’s probably not news to you that we grow lots of Broccoli at Terra Firma. It’s a staple of our CSA boxes from mid-October through March most years. It’s a versatile crop for us, as it enjoys warm, dry weather as well as cool conditions — although you may notice it tastes best when it’s quite cold outside. The waxy coating on its leaves, which it shares with its relatives cabbage and kale, allows it to tolerate even the wettest conditions of Norcal winters. It grows well in just about all soil types, too.
It’s nice, then, that Broccoli is also a versatile vegetable in the kitchen. Great in soups, stir-fries, dips and purees, frittatas…as well simply eaten as a snack or crudite. Not just tasty, broccoli is also a very healthy addition to your diet with tons of vitamins, minerals and fiber plus anti-cancer compounds.
And it turns out that growing broccoli is also great for the soil. It has huge roots that pull nitrogen from deep in the ground where other plants can’t get it, “recycling” nutrients and preventing them from entering the groundwater. When tilled into a field after harvest, it creates beneficial compounds as it decomposes that kill bad soil microbes while encouraging good ones.
We plant broccoli just about every week from mid-August until Halloween. Modern versions of broccoli produce just a single head, so we harvest each plant just once, generally finishing a planting in a week when its warm and in 2-3 weeks when it’s colder. In theory, we should be picking some amount of broccoli every week during the season. But it rarely works out that way.
Instead, the broccoli acts like drivers on a freeway, slowing down during colder weather and then speeding up when it’s warm. When it slows down, we may not have any broccoli to pick for weeks. And when it speeds up, two or even three plantings will overlap with each other, causing a “traffic jam” of broccoli in our coolers. We can’t store it for long periods like we can with cabbage or root vegetables, although it has a longer shelf life when harvested during cold weather.
After the chilly months of November and December, we’ve had a continuous traffic jam of broccoli since it, warmed up in January. You’ve likely noticed. We’ve blown through 10 weeks worth of broccoli in just a month, and on Friday we began harvesting the final planting of the winter roughly a month ahead of schedule.
This week’s stormy weather brought with it a dramatic change in air temperatures. It hit 75 degrees on both Friday and Saturday of last week; yesterday and today it likely won’t even hit 50. The rain, too, has an effect or at least the clouds that come along with it. With any luck, this will all slow down the growth and help keep our broccoli season from ending way too soon.
We hope you’ve been enjoying our broccoli season so far, and that you haven’t had too many “traffic jams” in your fridge. If you do, it’s good to remember that it’s easy to freeze broccoli — parboiling it first — for use later. This might be a particularly good strategy this year as it seems that our season is likely to end prematurely.
Thanks,
Pablito