These are my rapini broccoli seeds. Look! Spring! No, not really, in fact I need to keep them in my room because everywhere in our house where it would be normal to start seeds is still way too cold. But still, growing things.
Last year my mom and I started a vegetable garden for the first time. We had a broccoli disaster. I started 40 broccoli and cauliflower seeds (total, I did not have 80 plants). First of all, apparently broccoli seedlings (and cauliflower) get really leggy if they don’t get enough sunlight (fyi, no where in our house has significant sunlight, or our yard for that matter). So I had 40 leggy broccoli seedlings that really weren’t very far along when we put them in the ground (remember that sunlight problem I mentioned?) (I’m so into parenthesis today). So we planted them with high hopes, and within two days all but one plant was completely destroyed by bugs. Or maybe I should say vaporized. They were just gone. I would check on the garden once, and then come back two hours later and another row would just be gone…. And a few hours later the NEXT row would be gone. My one surviving seedling (of either broccoli or cauliflower, no one knew by this point), looked really strong and healthy, but never produced anything. So yeah, huge fail. String beans, tomatoes, and squash worked out well, but not the broccoli.
I decided I wanted to try broccoli again this year (who knows why I would ever want to go through that disaster again, but I do). But I went with rapini broccoli for whatever reason…. I haven’t even ever eaten rapini broccoli, but it looks good.
Here’s my bootleg seedling set up, a compact fluorescent lamp with a tin sheet to help reflect the light. I have no idea if this will do anything at all. Hopefully it will produce wonderful not leggy really strong broccoli. I don’t know where I’ll put the rest of the seeds I’m going to start next week….
But in reality they are looking a little leggy already. I could just be paranoid though.
We’ll see.
By the way, I got my rapini broccoli seeds from this lovely etsy shop: http://www.etsy.com/shop/HomegrownHealthy
Growing seeds is so exciting isn't it, so much expectation. Its' still far too cold where I live to start seeds (and I'm too tight to put the heating on :) ) but the packets are lined up and ready to go as soon as the time is right...
ReplyDeleteGood luck to your broccoli!