This season has been a really good year for growing a range of brassica family plants
such as cauliflower, kales, and cabbages.
I think that a lot of this was do to the fairly mild weather that we’ve had for most of
the growing season, a reasonably consistent supply of rain, and a better watering system
for when it was dry.
For the most part I've been able to keep pest damage under control, and there has not been
any significant disease or mineral deficiencies issues among these crops.
The different types of large brassica plants were all grown from the same seed and transplanted
at the same time into four of the outside family scale gardens.
Even with the different layouts, and the different approaches to soil management and fertility
across the 4 gardens, most of these plants are growing well and look great.
This is possibly the best crop of brassicas that I've grown, my most successful year of
growing this important family of vegetables.
It is so wonderful to see the health and vigour of these crops, and to realise just how big
and healthy they can be.
But this side by side comparison offers a chance to observe the differences between
the gardens, with some interesting observations about how the plants can negatively affect
each other.
There's quite a wide range of different brassica crops that I grow in these gardens, and there's
a lot more that I could grow.
But it can be difficult to fit them all in, with different space requirements, different
planting dates and different lengths of time that they need to grow in the garden before
harvesting.
And a lot of the crops can be sown multiple times during the season, with different varieties
available to stretch the harvest times throughout a lot of the year.
There are so many options, and different ways to approach this, but this year I've decided
to sow 3 different batches of the larger brassica plants, and to try to fit in the smaller faster
growing brassica plants in among these main batches.
I sowed cauliflower and broccoli plants earliest in the season, which were transplanted into
these 4 gardens in the third week of April, and then were then harvested at the end of
June and into the first half of July.
About 2 months later, in the second week of June, I transplanted in Brussels sprout plants,
as well as a type of summer kale, and 2 varieties of autumn cabbages.
I have been harvesting from these kale plants since late July, and one variety of cabbage
was already harvested in early autumn.
The other variety of cabbage should be ready from now until late autumn, but the Brussels
sprout plants won’t be producing buds until well into the winter.
A month later, during the 2nd week of July, I transplanted the third batch of a winter
cabbage, and overwintering varieties of kale and purple sprouting broccoli into the same
4 gardens.
This variety of cabbage will be available for harvesting over winter, with the kale
and purple sprouting broccoli plants producing tender sprouts well into the spring.
This diverse range of brassicas have all been quite successful in the Intensive Garden,
producing strong plants, for the most part.
They were all transplanted into 3 of the double dug beds, with the closest spacing between
plants of all 4 gardens.
The harvest so far has been larger than the other gardens, at least when calculated as
yield per m2 or area, but the individual heads of broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage have
been smaller on average that the other gardens.
This is what I would expect from this density of planting.
The second variety of autumn cabbage will soon be ready for harvesting, and two of the
plants are really large, most likely helped by the empty space created after the harvest
of the earlier cabbages.
But the other two plants of the same variety are quite a bit smaller, likely due to competition
from the adjacent Brussels sprout plants, which seem to have stunted and delayed these
two cabbage plants.
This is interesting as the Brussels sprout and cabbage plants were transplanted into
the garden at the same time.
It seems that small differences in the strength and vigour of otherwise quite similar plants,
can imbalance the competition and lead to big differences in how individual plants can grow.
The same set of brassica plants were arranged a bit differently in the No-Dig Garden.
This garden has one large bed devoted to the full range of this family of plants, with
cross rows for these larger brassicas, with each plant having slightly more space than
in the Intensive Garden Some of the plants do seem to be larger than
in the Intensive Garden, but others are significantly smaller, as it seems I misjudged the layout
of this bed.
I could have transplanted each of the three different batches as a group together, so
that all of the plants of the same age were beside each other.
But instead I grouped the plants according to when they would be harvested, thinking
that larger sections of the bed would be cleared and replanted at some point later in the season,
or next year, and I made a mistake on this.
The late planting of purple sprouting broccoli ended up being squished between the summer
kale and autumn cabbages, which had been transplanted 2 months earlier.
And the winter cabbage ended up being squished between the vigorous Brussels sprout plants
and autumn cabbage plants.
These younger plants struggled to become established with this close competition, even though the
older plants were at least 60 cm or 2 feet away.
The same range of brassicas in the Polyculture Garden had similar issues to the No-Dig garden,
although the layout of the plants is quite different.
I haven’t really figured out how best to position these larger brassica plants within
this garden, where I'm trying to maintain a degree of crop rotation, but also trying
to mix in a range of different plants.
This season I decided to devote one of the six large beds of this garden to these brassica
plants, which really doesn't fit into the polycropping methodology of this garden.
These various brassica plants were randomly placed across the bed, with the first batch
being transplanted into a bed of established salad greens.
These early cauliflower and broccoli plants really suffered with this interplanting into
an existing crop, and I should have cleared a larger space for them sooner.
This was probably made worse by not enough fertility, and neither crop produced anything
close to what I was able to grow in the other gardens as a result.
The second batch of plants, including the summer kale, the autumn cabbages and the Brussels
sprouts, generally did better, as the salad greens had mostly been cleared by then.
But the last batch of winter kale, cabbage and purple sprouting broccoli, struggled with
the competition from the more established plants, and may not produce very well at all.
Each of these plants that is still growing in this garden has more space than they have
in the other three gardens, which is really benefiting some crops, but other plants don’t
seem to be able to make use of this space.
I think that the random interplanting of these different crops is the key issue here, perhaps
made worse by not enough fertility, and this is something I'm going to have to rethink
for next season.
The layout of the Extensive Garden is quite different from the other gardens, with the
brassica rotation set up in three long rows.
The middle row had been planted with the first batch of cauliflower and broccoli plants,
and this was replaced later in the season with a variety of smaller, fast growing brassicas.
One of the outside rows was planted with all of the tall, long season crops, including
the two types of kale, the Brussels sprouts plants and the purple sprouting broccoli.
The third row was planted with autumn and winter cabbages, arranged in a row from early
to late harvest.
Each of these plants has significantly more space than is available in the Intensive or
in the No-Dig Garden, but slightly less space than is available in the Polyculture Garden.
The fact that the middle row was planted first and cleared fairly early, seems to have given
even more space to the outside rows which were planted later.
All of this really seems to have made a difference, and the plants in this garden are generally
larger than the other gardens, and in some cases quite a bit bigger, and they look healthier.
This is especially the case with the late crops of purple sprouting broccoli, the winter
kale, and especially a few of the winter cabbage, which are all really large plants with huge
leaves.
It's remarkable how large some of these plants can get when the fertility and weather is
good and they aren’t suffering from competition.
Interestingly, the winter cabbage plants are quite different sizes along the row, with
the larger plants generally clustered at one end, and a few smaller plants at the other.
This could be due to random differences in the viability of the individual plants, or
some underground root or pest issues, but I suspect that there may also be variation
in the soil fertility along he length of the row.
With such a small sample size and so many variables, it is difficult to come to any
definitive conclusions about all of this, but I have made some interesting observations,
or at least reinforced observations that I’ve made in the past.
The larger brassica plants seem to have vigorous root systems that can occupy the soil quite
far beyond the above ground part of the plant.
Because of this it is better to avoid planting young plants beside the established plants,
as they don’t seem to be able to get what they need from the soil.
Different types, or varieties of plants seem to be much more vigorous than others even
though they may be closely related, and this can cause unexpected competition.
The size of each of the brassica plants generally depends on the space it has to grow in, but
not always, and more space typically produces larger plants that seem to be healthier and
more resilient.
But maximum yields for a given area can generally be achieved by growing more plants that are
spaced closer together.
As with many things there is a balance that can be achieved here, and it generally depends
on the amount of fertility that is available, and also the type of crop, and even perhaps
the specific variety of the crop that is being grown.
It is generally better to group different plants that are transplanted into the garden
at the same time, but it's also useful to group these plants according to how long they
are going to be in the garden.
Trying to achieve both of these can be difficult, especially if I want to grow many of the wide
variety of different types of brassica plants.
If I want to keep all of these related crops in one section of the garden, in order to
maintain and effective crop rotation, it can be quite difficult to figure out how to fit
everything in.
Essentially, this is a design challenge.
How do I incorporate all these different issues into an appropriate planting plan for the
gardens, especially when so many of the different crops that I want to grow belong in this diverse
family of crops.
With larger gardens, and market gardens, this can be a lot easier to work out, as each bed
can be devoted to a different crop.
With smaller gardens, such as these, it can be much more difficult to fit everything in,
especially when there's a need or desire to grow as much as possible.
It’s likely easier in climates with hard cold winters, where there is generally only
one crop grown per bed each season.
In temperate climates like here in Ireland, where quite a few brassica crops can be productive
right through the winter, it can be more complicated to fit everything in.
In trying to balance all of these issues, I think that I have been most successful this
season with the design and layout of the Extensive Garden.
The layout of the brassica section of this garden into 3 widely spaced rows seemed to
work quite well, with different crops grouped according to how long they are in the soil.
The layout of both the Intensive and No-Dig gardens can be improved, but the close planting
really depends on good fertility levels in these gardens, and I need to pay more attention
to which crops are growing beside each other.
The Polyculture Garden definitely needs a radical redesign.
I'm planning to abandon the conventional crop rotation system for this garden, and to try
to mix up these larger brassicas plants with the other crop families.
This is a more difficult design challenge, as all these issues are still likely going
to arise, with the added complexity of the mix of so many different plants together.
In the other gardens the aim is generally to get the best result for all the plants.
But perhaps with the Polyculture Garden I need to take a more casual approach to all
of this, and accept that competition, diverse conditions and unexpected results are all
part of this methodology.
And this would require a different way of thinking and a different approach to the design
of the planting plan of this garden.