15 July 2010

Basil, Chioggia or Merlin beets, Blue Wind broccoli, Minuet Chinese cabbage, Olympian cucumber, Cilantro, Lettuce, Sugar Snap peas, Scallions, Squash

Sometimes I wonder why I continue to grow broccoli. It is the Goldilocks of vegetables: this spring is too cold and this spring is too hot. Theoretically our spring is just right. On average we have the sort of climate to make a picky crucifer happy. But when did we last have an average spring?

I am not complaining about the weather so far this season (I was just starting to think yesterday that we really needed some rain and then it rained). But the broccoli is. The heat and lack of water stressed it out, leaving it cranky and pale and unwilling to make a serious effort to do its job properly (fortunately the farm crew responded differently to the weather). The past two year it sulked in the rain and cold and did an even worse job.

Some of the best spring broccoli we have ever had got thrashed by hail at a tender age. Even since then I have considered whipping it into shape. I figure I could approximate the hail damage by going at the young broccoli with a weed whacker. But something (the voice of reason?) tells me my experiment would fail—plus I would turn up in a video on the web site of some group dedicated to fighting cruelty to vegetables and I am not willing to put up with the shame and protests just to get early broccoli.

Especially since I don’t like broccoli all that much. It is fine, but if it knew better it would be cauliflower. I have never understood why so many picky kids consider it one of the few acceptable vegetables. If I were going to be a picky child I would definitely not include broccoli on my list of vegetables I would deign to eat without throwing a fit. Cauliflower might make it. Lettuce certainly would, and onions and garlic and tomatoes and beets and eggplant and escarole and arugula and zucchini and chard and turnips and...

All right, so that is not the list of a picky eater. I am afraid I don’t have much experience being picky. My mother is English and grew up during World War Two. We ate what we were served. You never knew when the next convoy would make it past the U boats. It helped that most of her cooking lessons took place in the south of France rather than the suburbs of Birmingham. Otherwise I might have made it to adulthood without tasting garlic.

I don’t know if they eat a lot of broccoli in the south of France, but if they do they almost certainly douse it in garlic. That sounds like a good idea for a number of reasons. Aside from tasting good, it might help to keep at bay some of the creatures that want to eat the broccoli. And I am not talking about picky kids, though garlic probably would deter them. We don’t have a real problem with picky kids going after the broccoli out in the field. We do have a problem with flea beetles and cabbage loopers and deer. Not that the deer are serious about eating broccoli. They just browse on a few plants as they pass by and quickly decide they would rather go and destroy the beets and beans. But the other two can’t think of anything nicer to nibble on. A floating row cover helps keep them off the broccoli, but it also helps keep the heat on the broccoli. When it is ninety degrees out you have to choose between heat and bug damage.

We have an organic spray, DiPel (Bt. Kurstaki)_for the loopers that is pretty effective if you can get it on the stuff they are eating, but that is tough to do when they are in a head of broccoli. You cannot get a sprayer nozzle into a head of broccoli still attached to a broccoli plant. As for flea beetles, I don’t know of any spray that stops them. Conventional farmers must have some toxin that works, but I cannot imagine you would want to eat a crop sprayed with a chemical strong enough to do in flea beetles. Whatever it is, I doubt it is as good for you as garlic.

On top of all that, broccoli demands a lot of space and nutrients. Each plant takes up about two square feet of field and a lot of nitrogen in order to—if we are lucky—make one head of broccoli. The Chinese cabbage occupied less that half that space while producing something far bigger. The three rows of snap peas take up only a bit more space than a single planting of broccoli and they actually make nitrogen in the soil.

Despite all this I keep on planting broccoli. We will put in six plantings during the season, and we will fertilize and weed and spray and cover them in the hope that at some point—or maybe even several points—we get a good crop. It is kind of a pain, but it is our job. We are not just going to stick to things that are easy to grow, and anyway lots of crops require some special effort. We have to trellis the tomatoes and keep them on a regular dose of fungicide. The cucumbers are on raised beds covered in biodegradable plastic mulch and need a lot of help to survive the striped cucumber beetles. We have to hill the potatoes twice and check them weekly for outbreaks of Colorado potato beetles. The onions don’t respond well to competition; we have weeded the patch four times so far.

I sometimes think of the vegetables as my employees. I bring them to the farm to do a job, try my best to nurture them and to create a healthy working environment. But they can be a difficult bunch to manage. They make constant demands, object to my suggestions, take time off without asking, get sick frequently, and often have substandard work product. Sometimes I feel like getting rid of the bunch of them. But I need them to do the work so I put up with their foibles, even when, like broccoli, they are apt to produce inferior results when things don’t go exactly their way.