@MarkReed
I know you don’t want to know but here is a Wikipedia article about your little white or yellow enemy:
I know them well, they were the only butterflies we were allowed to shoot down with the garden hose when I was a kid lol.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to plant any broccolish seeds here at the new house as I don’t get to decide when the garden gets tilled. I couldn’t share any because I failed to label my brassica seeds I was harvesting during the move. Hopefully next year I’ll find a safe place to plant them a patch from each bag to find out which is which.
I sure hope yours can make it through the cold!
Yea, I know what they are, I just don’t care because it has no relevance in my quest to make peace with them. My broccol-ish is doing fine and not so good. Fine in that I have quite a few plants that have resumed slow growth. Not so good in that they do not have the obvious range of phenotype I am looking for. Most have the wrinkled green leaves and the low rosette growth habit. That growth habit is probably why they did better during the deep freeze.
Only one surviving plant has the more upright habit and the smoother leaves with the red veins, and the jury is still out on if it will make it. I sure hope so as those have the best flavor.
@MarkReed those butterflies are some of the worst pests that i remember my mom dealing with growing up, i was also often roped into picking the caterpillars off plants. From your ever increasing experience with broccolish, and im interested in others experience as well, what phenotypes or varieties have you noticed tend to do the best despite the butterflies? I think i read somewhere (probably in josephs book) about how different colored plants might do better with established pests because predators of the pest can see the pest against the plant easier. Have you noticed that to be the case for broccolish?
I just now came in from inspecting and snacking in the broccil-ish patch. After the -14 F cold snap before Christmas, I thought pretty much all of the purple/red leaved plants were gone and that all I had left were the green ones and only three or four obvious types of them. One with smother sort of shiny leaves and one with more wrinkled leaves that look a lot like kale being the most numerous.
Now though, it looks like nearly all of the apparent dead ones are not dead at all. Even those where a thick stalk had died down to the ground have sprouted healthy shoots from the base. ALL plants have shrugged off the 18 - 25 F lows of the last few mornings and ALL taste great! Leaves on many seem sort of thick and a bit chewy but the flavor is wonderful, almost sweet on many. I don’t know if that is result of genetic mixing or because of growing in the cold, I kind of suspect it is more due to the cold.
Those colored ones are my favorites and although having had to restart form almost nothing there will likely be less seeds than from the green ones, but seeds from the colored ones will be favored in this fall’s planting.
I haven’t noticed a difference between the different types or varieties of this family as far as the caterpillars go. With the broccol-ish the caterpillars are a non-issue. Avoiding them entirely and hot dry weather as well, were primary reasons to start this project and it seems to be working! It is six weeks or more before most people around here will even be planting cabbage or broccoli. I expect to be harvesting broccil-ish in just a week or two and for a month or more after that. By the time the worms get here in mass the plants will be maturing seed and it doesn’t matter all that much if the worms eat the leaves.
In my neighborhood (southern), the solution to those worms is to delay planting about a week later in the fall than I would otherwise, so that my plants are coming up just as the yellow rumped warblers arrive for the winter. They will go through the plants every morning cleaning up the worms for me and are quite efficient. The delay also seems to reduce my aphid pressure, which is a big problem that I’m trying to solve through a combination of cultural practices (timing, bed maintenance) and variety selection. There’s probably a Landrace in our future, but not yet.
@MarkReed that is so exciting! You are even further along in your project than you had hoped! That is so ideal, and means your plants can probably adapt to even more regions than you first thought. And you are so early in your pirject too! And hopefully you’re even closer to selling seeds (i hope🤣)
Broccol-ish is doing well, no harvestable bloom stalks of any size yet but plenty of tasty leaves. Good just to munch on, put in salads or in place of cabbage in vegetable soup. Also, good lightly sauteed in butter with some fresh garlic leaves.
Last year I planted a very cold tolerant broccoli from Baker Creek called Yod Fa. It went to seed ridiculously fast and did not coincide with the broccil-ish. I’ve been planting a little bit of it a time for last couple of weeks and it is all up and going. I’m sure I can accomplish getting it crossed into the broccol-ish but not entirely sure I want to.
On one hand it might introduce genetics to convert the broccol-ish to an annual rather than bi-annual. And perhaps decrease days to harvest. I kind of like the sound of both of those as long as I can still grow it in the cold.
On the other hand, it might mess my broccol-ish up in some unanticipated way. With this year being the most severe as far as temperature swings that my broccol-ish has endured so far, I’m thinking of delaying introduction of the Yod Fa until I have a backup supply of this year’s seed.
What I plan to do with my landraces is keep a backup supply of lots of seeds in my freezer from every previous year. That way, if I think I’ve crossed in something undesirable, I can always “revert to backup.”
I seem to recall that’s what Joseph Lofthouse did after he accidentally introduced a poisonous melon into his melon landrace.
I like Mark’s idea of delaying the introduction of Yod Fa until after saving seeds from those survivor plants, because those sound like something special. And then crossing Yod Fa with them, in order to see what will happen, sounds like an excellent risk to take. “High risk high reward” can result in high disappointments. “Low risk high reward” is often worth trying.
Yep, I have plenty of backup seed. I have decided though not to let the Yod Fa cross into my mix. Also, I’m culling some plants. Just yesterday I examined and tasted all of them and found two that are apparently overly attractive to some kind of nasty stink bug critter. I removed all of their blooms and developing seed pods. I left the plants to keep attracting the bugs so I can keep squashing them.
I also found four plants that have significantly superior flavor. It has turned a bit hot and dry here and quality overall is declining anyway so I culled all less tasty plants near those four. This weekend I’m going to cull all except those four. I’ll tag stems with unopen flowers, so I’ll know which seeds from the four are crossed with just each other. I’m only keeping seed from those four plants, stalks without tags are crossed with the whole population, those with tags are from just the four.
This fall’s planting will be about 75% from the four x four, and the rest a mix of the four x everything and from previous year’s backup seeds. And I’ll probably plant with some degree of organization so I can keep tack rather than like I generally do. Those four survived the flash freeze, taste great, represent at least three obvious phenotypes and have not had any issue with the bugs. I think going forward, I may what them to be the maternal ancestors of the whole crop.
Cool season crops convert their starches to sugar to protect against freezing temperatures when it gets cold outside. So they are sweeter when eaten in the colder months. Plant antifreeze.
As far as I know broccoli is also biannual, it’s just usually grown as annual to have better yields. They should stay alive if you let them be and nothing kills them (might be that they are more sensitive to cold). In any case, broccoli, kale and cabbage (+many more) are different forms of same species and cross freely if they just flower the same time. I would suspect that if you have them overwinter they will flower about same time, but on first year it might be harder to have broccoli flower same time as last years kale for example.
Yes, that is the approach I will be taking; I let a bunch of broccoli cross with itself the first year, and will plant out these seeds next fall, alongside some kale plants, and let them all overwinter and cross in the spring. (If you let broccoli plants go to seed the first year, they usually die before the Fall.)
Yes, they often might as many are bred to use a lot of energy to make one big head, but atleast they should have the ability to do so. Atleast sprouting type broccoli should work as biannual if winters aren’t too severe as it’s more of a continuous harvest type.
