How To Grow Broccoli From Seed To Plate

If you want some big beautiful heads of broccoli, whether you've never grown it before or you want some tips that I've stolen off some market gardeners, you've found the right video. Broccoli is one of the easier crops to grow but there are a few key moments throughout its life cycle where you can really go wrong, so I'll show you how to avoid those. And the good news is this advice won't only apply to broccoli but it also applies to cabbage and cauliflower, kale, brussel sprouts because those are all part of the same species. I'll show you how to take broccoli from seed and take it all the way through to your kitchen plates. I'll even give you a couple tips with cleaning it and getting it ready to store well. Now let's dig in. But this video has been just about the longest time coming on this channel because once people find out that I'm a YouTuber and ask me what sort of videos I make, I usually just say that I talk about broccoli but I don't have a video specifically on broccoli and it almost feels a bit full circle because broccoli was one of the first ingredients that I really wanted to grow when I first got into gardening. It was literally herbs and broccoli. And it's funny that this is actually the first video that I'll be filming after the one year anniversary of the channel so it almost feels a bit full circle but without further ado let's get on to starting some seeds. As far as seed starting goes, broccoli is on the easier end of the spectrum. Certainly if you've never started stuff from seeds before, broccoli is probably one of the better ones to start with because it'll teach you the basics but it's not too punishing in any real way. There's no real tricks with getting broccoli started other than like many crops what it wants is to stay nice and moist for a couple of days usually about a week or so is how long it's going to take for the water to completely hydrate that seed and get it to sprout. The other thing that it wants is just some warmer temperatures so broccoli is a great one to start indoors or in a greenhouse usually regardless of what season it is. Obviously if the height of summer you can just start it straight outside but through most of the rest of the year starting it inside on a sunny windowsill is a great place to start. I never really encourage people to buy extra stuff for gardening you can usually get by with whatever you already have on hand but a great investment for seed starting is a seed raising mat which is just a little mat that sits below your seed tray so it'll help warm it up to the ideal temperature which is what I use and how I get nearly all of the seeds that you see here and in the garden started. When starting broccoli seeds especially if you're a beginner I would recommend probably putting two seeds in each seed cell so that you're basically guaranteed to get at least one of them to germinate in each cell and then once you've got both going you can just kill whichever one looks the least healthy out of the two. When you do that you'll just snip it off the base but you usually won't do that until just before you're ready to transplant so you'll usually give it a couple weeks. In ideal conditions seedlings can emerge as early as four or five days is usually what I've been able to get it down to but it can take up to about a week. If it's been about two weeks since you've sown them if you're sowing them in seed trays and you make sure that they're wet and warm and your seedlings haven't emerged yet usually there's going to be a problem and I would probably just start again and try and work out out of moisture content of the soil or temperature that's probably where you've gone wrong or you might have expired seeds. Try and work out what's gone wrong there and then just start again. You can of course just buy them as seedlings from nurseries. I'll put broccoli in the camp of about moderate value in terms of how much time it saves to how expensive they are. I would definitely recommend just buying whatever cheapest bunch of seedlings that you can buy that are small. Usually those ones that come in lots of eight to ten that you'll get for three to four dollars I would go for that. I wouldn't be buying the bigger seedlings unless it's for a specific project. The reality is once they're the size that you need to transplant them there's not really much of a difference when it comes to broccoli. You're only saving yourself a couple weeks but potentially doubling or quadrupling the price. Starting broccoli seeds or any veggies indoors is one of the best ways to make your garden more productive. You get to really maximize all the space at your disposal and if you're wondering why the sudden costume change well it's actually spring right now and this video I filmed in early to mid-winter and it's taken me this long to get around to editing it. But you might have noticed lately that I have been releasing a fair few more videos and also tons of extra content on the Patreon. Consider joining by the way. But the reason I've really been able to get on top of everything lately is I've taken this productivity masterclass by Ali Abdaal on today's sponsor Skillshare. This channel has been one of the best things that's happened to me in my whole life and I really don't want to let my audience down and I have far more cool ideas of videos that I want to make than I do have time to make them. So I'm trying to learn how to manufacture myself more times that I get to bring both more videos that I'm really excited about and a bunch of the requests that you guys keep making. I'm still not perfect but I've definitely been doing a better job of it. Skillshare is this awesome online platform that is your one-stop shop for upskilling and improving yourself. They have a huge variety of classes like arts, video, music, marketing, coding. There's also a bunch of really cool gardening plant content on there like this course is designed specifically on interior design and improving your space using indoor plants which until I took this course I hadn't realized but I'd just been crowding all of my pot plants around the one good window. Now I'm integrating them far better into my spaces than I ever was before. If you want to give Skillshare a go you can get your first month free by clicking the link in the description or with a QR code on screen which they even made green for us because it's a green channel. Thank you very much to Skillshare for sponsoring this video. It really is an awesome platform. Once your seedlings have started to emerge they will look something like this for the first couple days. Now for transparency this is kale seeds but they will look identical to this just these two little leaves. Now the big mistake that I think new gardeners can make at this stage is that broccoli seeds will start a lot easier if you start them indoors but once they emerge or you get most of the tray emerging we need to get this a lot of light. If you don't get them a lot of light at this stage what will happen is they'll grow what's called leggy which is where the stem just keeps extending trying to find light and that will lead to problems with them getting a bit floppy which broccoli is already really inclined to shoot up a little bit too long of a stem and if we're not getting enough light we're just going to be exacerbating that issue. The main thing at this little stage is we just need to put it somewhere where it's going to get plenty of light. Another early indication you can get that these might be about to get a bit leggy is if the leaves are all starting to really move over towards one edge this isn't too bad but if they are starting to do this a thing that you can do is they'll be most likely trying to crawl towards a window and you can just come along and flip them towards the other direction and it will help straighten them out a little bit but this is only going to buy you an extra day or two before you are going to have to move them out to somewhere with full sun. The one other thing to mention with this stage is we do want to keep them well watered without them ever just sitting in water a lot so the easiest way to do this is just come out and fill the trays and once they start to get a little bit light if you can just sit them in a bottom tray where we can then come along and bottom water this. It's going to be the most foolproof way to be able to try and make sure they get enough water without flooding them. You do really want to try and let the soil dry out a little bit before you're re-watering them. Then we have our next stage of the life cycle this is where they start to become proper little seedlings where we start to get our first what's called true leaves which is the leaves that the plant will put out for the rest of its life as opposed to the first couple leaves that it just comes with from the seed just to kind of get itself going. Now anywhere from about this size and if you are buying your broccoli from seedlings this is going to start to be about the sort of size that you'll be getting in trays maybe this or a little bit bigger but anywhere from about here is when we can start to transplant them out into the garden. Now the two big issues that you can run into at this sort of stage is the first one is just letting it go too long. Brassicas really hate getting root bound which these won't be getting close to doing but once they sort of double or double in a bit in size again then the roots will be getting really really restricted in here and if it ever gets too root bound it will just stunt its growth and you're basically better off starting again than just trying to recover the plant. Which is another thing to look out for if you're ever picking up brassicas on say clearance is just pull out the root ball and give that a bit of an inspection to make sure it's not ridiculously root bound. The other thing to sort of note at this stage is that you might have had some go really leggy and if that's the case once you're transplanting them that's a good chance to put those down a little bit further to make sure that these aren't going to be too floppy in the soil because you really don't want this just directly touching the soil once you actually transplant them. My personal preferred size to transplant them is once they get their second set of new leaves which I will be able to show you over in my cauliflower patch. This is my cauliflower patch that I've transplanted over about a week ago and this is about as big as I like to let brassicas get before transplanting them. Obviously you could pot them up but at this stage once they're at this size there's no real use in keeping them in a pot unless you are really waiting on your garden space to become available because you're waiting for other plants to come out. But this is a great size to transplant them and the great news is that once they are at about this size once they've been in the bed for about two weeks and have survived that initial transplanting broccoli then becomes a really low maintenance plant except for a couple things you'll need to keep an eye out for. Once your broccoli is in the bed and growing you don't need to do a whole lot to it but there are a couple things that you do need to make sure you keep on top of. The first one is obviously just watering, making sure that they're getting enough water, making sure that you're not just flooding them out. Anything between those two kind almost extremes and that will tend to do quite well. The other thing to note is that when selecting your broccoli variety just make sure to look up on the back of the packet or research a little bit as to how that's going to handle your climate and time of year because we've done a pretty good job at creating a bunch of different broccoli varieties that grow in different temperatures. You will get ones that do really well in the cold, can even be frost tolerant which means that during the harshest coldest nights of winter where we'll get a frost where the air almost turns icy where all their leaves and everything are going to be really resistant to that and not going to get damaged by that. However those sort of varieties are more likely to what's called bolt during the summer which is what's happened over here which is where they go to flower really quickly and then the same with the warmer months there's a bunch of varieties which are a lot better at growing through the heat where you're going to have a wider window between when they are just developing a nice head and when they're going to go bolt and go to flower. The next thing is fertilizer. Broccoli does love a decent hit of fertilizer but you can keep it really simple just stick to some sort of all-purpose fertilizer. You can either go granular fertilizer which you'll sprinkle on the soil or you can also use liquid fertilizer which you can water into the soil or you can also apply it with a foliar spray which is where we spray the leaves with a watered down fertilizer. I personally mostly stick to all-purpose liquid fertilizers and also the foliar sprays. But the last thing will cause you a lot of issues you will have to encounter at some point. I've already got nearly an entire video dedicated to them and that is the cabbage moth which fun fact is the reason that all of these broccoli plants are so full of holes is instead of doing a lot of early intervention with cabbage moths to make sure I could get footage for my pest guide video I let the cabbage moth population over here get a little bit crazy and they did a really good job of eating a whole bunch of these broccoli leaves but I finally got it under control. Thankfully there are some really easy ways to take care of it. The quick guide to looking after cabbage moths which are the white butterflies you probably see floating around your garden. The butterflies themselves aren't that big of an issue but their caterpillars are. Their caterpillars will wreak havoc on your brassicas. The first thing you need to do is just regularly get in the habit of coming out and just looking on the underside of leaves and you're looking for little pods of eggs because those eggs will hatch into the caterpillars. Next if you do find them you can just scrape them off you can burn them off and you can also use a horticultural oil or make a homemade white oil that you spray all over your plants which are perfectly natural and fine to use but they help disrupt their eating habits and breeding habits of the cabbage moths enough to help you get them under control which is mostly what I had to rely on to really get this all under control. That's all completely organic though but if you find the caterpillars themselves you just need to physically pick them off they're completely harmless to touch you just throw them in a bin feed them to your chickens if you have chickens but I almost guarantee this they're going to be one or two floating around in here. Now one other step that you don't have to take when growing broccoli but I love doing I really recommend and especially if you are planting them quite close together like I like to and like I have in my patch over there. One of the best things that you can do to help keep them disease free is as they grow you want to start trimming some of these lower leaves like these ones that are essentially touching the soil well this one is touching the soil we're going to remove and this will help do a couple things it'll help create a stronger stem it'll mostly just help with disease prevention because anytime we have leaves laying in contact with the soil this is such an easy entry point for diseases to come from the soil and microbes or funguses to enter the plant that sort of thing which can end up killing the plant. What it also helps the plant do is just get airflow through here say if these were planted a lot closer together airflow can become quite a problem like it is over there one of the reasons that that really tight clump of broccoli manages to grow together so well and is so productive despite being in quite a confined space is that as they have been growing up I've just been clipping this off and it'll look a little bit funny for a while but once they're big you don't really notice any of those leaves that you just pruned off don't look too bad like these are a bad example but if they just look like regular leaves you can actually eat these because this is just what cabbage is you just chop this up and chuck it in a salad next you just get to keep doing that and wait until they're ready to harvest now what I will say is most likely when you're planting out your broccoli you'll probably plant something like 10 to 12 plants which is usually the sort of amount that I personally planted about a time but the problem is if you plant all those at the same time they're all going to be ready together and you will go from having no broccoli for three months and then all of a sudden you'll have all of your heads ready to go in two weeks now I will help you on later out with trying to preserve them after you've harvested them for a little bit longer but ultimately it's still pretty difficult to get through a whole bunch of broccoli that's already all at once now what I would encourage you to do is once you start having your crop come through the cut the first couple that are starting to look good and ready even if they look to be about half the size of a head that you would buy in the supermarket I'd encourage you to still harvest that that's probably going to be a couple weeks early and what you can do is you'll extend your harvesting time when broccoli is going to be ready in the garden from a couple weeks all the way out till well with a couple tricks I'm about to show you maybe closer to eight weeks or so depending on the season but the first thing you want to know is once you start having a couple small heads come through really don't be shy from harvesting that and using those because you'll end up with plenty later on now when it comes to harvesting broccoli there is a great trick that I think a lot of newbies might miss but it can literally double or even triple now probably more likely double your yield that you'll get out of each given plant and that's whenever we're harvesting a head of broccoli what we want to do is find the lowest and largest side shoot that's producing a bunch of florets and they will look quite small but what we want to do is find that and then cut off just above that as our head of broccoli leaving this little sprout left on the stem and that will become its entire own head of broccoli now this most likely won't get as large as the main head that you've produced because the plants already put so much energy into that first head but you'll still get something decently sized it can be anywhere up to about 90% of the size but more likely about half the size off that and the cool thing is depending on your season and how the plant likes in that season you can do the same process two or three or four times which just makes your plants just so much more productive and it's also great because if you are like me and you get pretty gigantic heads of broccoli that usually become two meals once you start getting these secondary heads these are a lot more realistic of what you kind of want as a side serving of broccoli so they're actually even more usable now once you've harvested your broccoli there's a couple problems that you might run into with the harvested head of broccoli itself now if you have ever grown your own broccoli before you've harvested it and then chucked in the fridge and left it for about a day and you've come back and it's just kind of really soft and floppy uh it's a mistake that all of us have made but one of the easiest ways to prevent this is also a great way to clean your broccoli so what we want to start by doing is just getting a big cold bowl of water and in terms of preservation all you need to do is just put the broccoli in that for half an hour or an hour or so the reason this happens is the broccoli's reflex of sucking up water is still there because the way that plants suck up water is closer to a sponge than any kind active movement if that makes sense so by submerging it in water for half an hour an hour or so you'll help make sure that it's nice and full of water to help it stay that kind of crisp that we want the other thing is we also want to make sure that it's clean and one of the best ways to do this and help make sure that's clean from bugs as well is if you just dissolve about a quarter of a teaspoon of baking soda not baking powder baking soda which will make this water slightly alkaline make sure it's nice and mixed in with this water and then submerge the broccoli completely in that and you'll be surprised even a completely clean looking head of broccoli you'll pull it out after this half an hour an hour and you'll just look at all the different bits of dirt and bugs and more often than not caterpillar or two that was somehow hiding in that head of broccoli now you usually only can keep this stuff in the fridge for a couple days or so up to a week depending on how that first step's gone but if you want to keep it for longer and freeze it the extra step that you want to take is you want to blanch it which you're going to want to get a pot of water bring it to the boil salt it well similar to pasta water and then we're going to cut up our broccoli into usable little chunks and we're going to put it into this water for about two or three minutes to make sure you're not overcreating the pot i usually do this in and then once you're bringing that out you want to try and put this into cold ice cold water to make sure that it stops cooking immediately and personally what we normally do in our household is this is the first thing that we do immediately after cleaning it we come and blanch it and then from here you can either freeze it or we just leave this in the fridge instead of the raw broccoli because when it comes to mealtime this is super easy to pull out and cook with in a number of ways you basically can just chuck this in a pan for an extra couple minutes to reheat it with maybe some salt and butter and you have yourself a delicious side dish but that has been broccoli one of the best crops to grow at home one of the best for beginners to give a go there are some weird tips and tricks here and there but all in all it's pretty easy and something you should definitely be able to do if you've liked this video please consider giving it a thumbs up maybe consider checking out another video i want to thank you so much to the patreons maybe consider checking it out remember you can get a free month of skillshare by being one of the first 500 people to use the link in the description or the code on screen thank you very much i'll see you next time