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Broccoli is one of my favorite vegetables to grow in the winter time. It is really very
simple to grow and you will get these wonderful heads of Broccoli. It has few issues other
than occasional problems with caterpillars. If you do see those green caterpillars eating
the underside of the leaves, you can hand pick those off or you can spray your cabbage
plants with B-T, a product that contains Bacillus thuringiensis and that's going to affect any
caterpillar that goes through the moth or butterfly stage. The other thing you can use
is Spinoza, but make sure with Spinoza that you are not spraying when the bees are active
because that product is toxic to bees. A nice big head of broccoli like this can be cut
off with a sharp knife and taken into the kitchen. You want to harvest it before it
starts to turn yellow and blow apart. You want the head to be nice and dark green and
very tight before harvesting. But the way you harvest can really make a difference in
production of your broccoli. A lot of people pull the broccoli stalk out when they harvest
that main head. If you leave the broccoli in you get all kinds of little side shoots
forming along the stem. The deeper you cut the stem of broccoli, the more side shoots
you will get. A longer stalk of broccoli will leave more leaf nodes and you will get more
side shoots but the will be smaller. Cut deeper and you will get larger side shoots. You can
see this is the side shoots that I cut off of one broccoli plant this week, and its almost
the side of a normal head. You can get another picking of those another seven to ten days
for about six weeks after you harvested the main head of broccoli so you really get a
lot of production out of your broccoli by doing it like that. This is a broccoli side
shoot that has started to get into the bloom stage. I actually don't mind letting a few
of my broccoli bloom because the bees love those flowers and this time of the year there
is not a lot of other things for the bees to be consuming. So let one of your broccoli
go to flower if you like. And the leaves of broccoli the small leaves like this are very
tender. They are great to put into stir fries, add to soups, or sauté like other greens.
They are really delicious so take advantage of those too. Now another great crop that
I love in the fall is fennel, the blubbing fennel, and fennel tends to grow in a cluster
but what a lot of people will do is just pull the fennel out of the garden like this but
what I found is if I make a cut and I sever the fennel right under the base of the bulb
then that plant will often grow another fennel bulb. Especially the zettafina it's quite
good at growing new ones. Fennel will also have caterpillars on it as well, but typically
those are going to be swallowtail butterfly larva, so those I don't want to spray. In
fact this week, I've been moving caterpillars from my dill and my parsley to the fennel
plant because I don't tend to eat the foliage of the fennel much, there is plenty of foliage
on the plant and you can use that for fish or chicken or adding that to eggs and salad
dressings and it's really delicious. I leave most of the fennel for those caterpillars
and they love it. So try these techniques for harvesting your vegetables and see how
much more production you can get out of your garden. For Backyard Basics I'm Trisha Shire,
thanks for joining us.