Brussels Sprouts

While I've been a Brussels sprout enthusiast for a while, I've recently converted my husband into a fun, especially when I cook them with bacon. So we decided to try to grow sprouts ourselves even though I had been warned that they could be difficult. Last October I got some lovely seedlings from Berkeley Horticultural Nursery and got them in the ground in mid-November. To try to combat the slugs I turned to the copper tape again, but this time stuck it to the outside of some one gallon plastic pots that i had cut in half to help keep the tape in place.



This new slug prevention worked like a charm, the only maintenance I had to do was make sure that after it rains that the copper isn't then covered in mud and to keep them free of weeds and low-hanging leaves that provide the slugs with a bridge to get to the plants.

And so we've been watching and waiting for our sprouts to actually appear. And waiting...and waiting... Then all of a sudden they started to flower! Which with fruit bearing vegetables like tomatoes is a good sign since it means you will soon have tomatoes, but is not a good sign with greens, including Brussels sprouts. After some more research it turns out the these guys are VERY time sensitive and I planted them too late, even though the seedlings were not available at BHN until about October when I bought them. So now we have plants as tall as me happily flowering plants but nothing to eat!



So I'm going to let them go to seed and start my own seedlings based on the recommended planting schedule I've dug up in my research. The recommendation is that you count 6 months backwards from the first frost in your area and that's when the seedlings should go in the ground. So starting in June once I have seeds I'm going to start seedlings and put them in the ground starting in July and some experimenting with the planting timeline to see what produces the best results. Fingers crossed that this winter we'll actually get to eat some home-grown Brussels.