Dunno. But broccoli is doing that to me.
j
Could it be a temperature problem? You don’t state your location, but cauliflower is a cool weather crop and in most of the US it’s usually harvested by late Spring/early Summer. Here on the Gulf coast it’s a winter crop.
I have been gardening for 24 years and have never gotten more tomatoes than this year! 12 plants, and am bringing in maybe 4-5 pounds a day. I give them away to friends, family, my hairdresser, strangers passing by, etc.
Those stupid Sungolds are crazy productive. Purple Cherokee have the best flavor.
I’m in SW England, where guides tell me I should expect to harvest romanesco between September and November, so maybe I’m just being impatient. It’s been a very dry, warm summer for this part of the world so a fair few things are out of whack one way or another.
The winter before last, I bought myself the very first tree for my new house. A discounted apple tree. I hadn’t grown the variety before, but reviews said it was a good, sweet, eater. Not the best storage but great fresh.
Planted it, and last year it was really unhappy; not only not a single fruit setting from the handful of flowers, but die back and early leaf drop. So, I pruned the damaged bits out and moved it to a better spot in the garden; more light, deeper soil.
This spring it was covered in blossom, with a whole mass of fruit setting- far too many for such a small, newly planted tree. So I thinned, watered, thinned again in fear of the wind, cossetted the tree through the weird weather, and waited with anticipation for the fruit to swell and ripen now the harvest season is approaching…
…and the damn thing’s a mislabelled crab apple isn’t it.
Oooo! That’s the worst. I have a mislabeled non-Honey Crisp. It’s maybe a Red Delicious or something. Absolute crap. My other tree was just there for pollination. It’s a Red Rome, which is a baking apple. Man, it’s productive as hell. Not at all what I was hoping for.
But we do like applesauce. Homemade applesauce is nothing like store bought. It has flavor!
My little container garden on the back deck this year is weird.
Oh, the sweet banana peppers are doing … okay, I suppose. Two of the three plants have produced peppers, but not many. The third has all kinds of flowers ready to bloom, but they haven’t yet. Lots of little buds that look like they might flower at any time, but they haven’t. And they’ve been at that stage for a week.
I tried grape tomatoes this year, and while they’re producing, I had no idea that they would become as tall as they have. All are tall, and so, I’ve got tomato cages. But they don’t stop growing, so I brought in a couple of trellises. And now, I’m out of trellises, and one plant is about seven feet tall. The tomatoes I’m getting are very nice though, so I shouldn’t complain.
How do people keep brassicas from being attacked - mainly by cabbage white butterflies for me! I’ve had everything netted all summer but damn those things, they still manage to get in. They’ve caused untold damage to my broccoli and cauliflowers.
BT (Bacillus thuringiensis) products work great on cabbage looper caterpillars. They’re almost mandatory if you want crops from Brassicas without the foliage being chewed to bits. It’s available as a dust or concentrate you dilute and spray onto plants.
As for sweet peppers, the best-tasting and most productive varieties I’ve grown have been the slim Asian types, such as Fushimi. Some of them (along with hot varieties) are described here:
BT isn’t available for home growers in the UK, which I believe SanVito is also resident in, at least not legally…
Let’s see if I did this correctly. From my front steps, a few hours ago. (“Flying Saucer” morning glory, my new favorite after “Heavenly Blue.”)
