Purple sprouting broccoli
To many people the word Brassica simply means cabbage: green and round, green and leafy or perhaps a cannonball red one but, still, a boring cabbage, for which little garden space is earmarked.
Brassica, though, is the botanical name for what is actually a huge family of plants. Some of them are purely ornamental rather than edible and all of them are easy to grow and deserve of lots of space in our gardens.
One of the beauties of the extended Brassica family is that the majority of the species — there are around 3,700 species in this extensive family and 338 genera — share the basic requirements of neutral to slightly acidic soil conditions in a reasonably sunny, well-drained, garden area. These shared requirements make it a relatively trouble-free task when allocating a garden bed in which to cultivate an interesting variety of what are extremely nutritious vegetables. For added visual interest, they can be edged with a narrow border of flowering members of the same family.
There is a type of cabbage for every single season of the year
Planting various Brassicas in the same bed also simplifies watering and pest control. It also helps when it comes to essential crop rotation patterns.
Soil preparation is key to successful Brassica cultivation: simply weed and dig the selected area — removing stones, roots of perennial weeds and any other debris in the process. Then dig in copious amounts of old, well-rotted, preferably organic, manure/compost and you are ready to roll. Soil preparation should be done at least six weeks in advance of seed sowing and then kept lightly watered to help in manure/compost breakdown. A light dusting with organic lime, two to three weeks prior to seed sowing is also recommended as, along with nourishing Brassicas, lime is a major help in combating ‘club root’ problems.
All Brassicas need constant soil moisture: this means not allowing the soil to completely dry out in between watering — but not drowning them either, please.
Now, without further ado, let’s take a look at some of the most useful members of this massively diverse ‘tribe’.
Cabbage (Brassica olracea var capitata) really is the ‘king’ of vegetables and there is a type of cabbage for every single season of the year. Leafy, open-hearted cabbages are, especially in our climate, the best types to grow for spring and summer cropping with hard-headed ones, including red cabbage, more suited to the cooler weather of late autumn and winter. Simple to start off from seed, this should be thinly sown, just a quarter of an inch deep, in prepared seed beds/trays/pots, with seedlings being transplanted out into their permanent growing positions at the four- to six-leaf stage. Planting distances vary from variety to variety, so please check instructions on the seed packets for this.