Harvesting and storing

The broccoli has started coming in across the last fortnight and it's been abundant. The brassica cages have been an absolute, unqualified success so far; I wish I had pictures of last year's crops to show so I could compare and contrast. Shockingly enough, I wasn't particularly keen on photographing the mess that I had last year - I was more interested in trying to spot and pick out cooked caterpillars before I ate them.

My saviour!

They are by far and away the best investment I have made in my garden in my three years of doing it and I'd say they're an absolute must if you're planning on growing anything leafy like cabbages, broccoli or cauliflower, even if you only get small ones for the individual plants. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and keeping the butterflies and snails (and cats) from getting to my beloved brassicae has made my life so much easier.

So, away from the love-letter to the cages, back to the broccoli.

Of course, almost all of the broccoli has come to fruition at the same time. The florets of calabrese broccoli are basically repressed flowers and the aim of the plant is for those flowers to come to fruition. Of course, your aim is to get the head as big as possible before it turns into horrible bitter seedy flowers, which is a delicate balancing act and one made more difficult by the recent hot spell. Broccoli are cold-weather plants, so if they overheat, they think they're imminently about to die and so immediately switch to flowering mode to try and spread their seed before their demise.

Therefore, I've ended up with a mass of broccoli this week. Technically speaking, we could just eat broccoli every day until the glut is gone, but I am both lazy and very poor at managing my eating habits, so that seems unlikely to happen. Instead, I have gone down the route of freezing what I haven't eaten/cooked and stored for daughter.

For those playing along at home, broccoli and other green vegetables are the easiest things in the world to freeze. The trick is to cut it into florets and then blanch them, which is basically scalding the vegetable for 2 minutes in rapidly boiling water before dunking in very cold water. The short time in the heat destroys the enzymes that degrade stored vegetables and also kills off a load of bacteria, while the cold water stops it from cooking through. You can then drain off the water, put in a zip-bag and freeze in the bottom of your freezer. Et voila, instead of having a fortnight of nothing but broccoli and then none till next year, this broccoli will last till November and next month's secondary harvest will do me through Christmas and into the new year.

Of course, I complain about having a surfeit of broccoli now, but this is going to seem like halcyon days once the green beans come in next month.

Yes, every one of those little stringy bits is going to turn into a green bean. No, I don't think scurvy is going to be an issue this month.

PJW