Hey all, I am direct sowing and flat sowing the GTS Broccoli grex this week. I greatly look forward to this mix as, ostensibly, we have quite a bit of diversity to work with off the shoot (pun intended). Thank you to all contributors!
Please leave any and all thoughts, notes, documentation, photos and or other tidbits here concerning the GTS Broccoli mix (and any other OP broccoli additions). I’ll post more in the weeks ahead but I wanted to get this thread up and running for any of you growers living in more early-spring hospitable locales.
Best of luck and may the honey of good and vibrant growing pour over your fields and gardens.
We had an exceptionally warm first half of winter (we went into February with only 10 chill hours recorded for the season), so it was definitely a test year for flavor in spite of heat. Most of our rapa didn’t make the cut. About half of our generally-reliable Oleracea was unpleasantly flavored throughout. Right or wrong, we’re letting some especially good-flavored sprouting broccoli go ahead and pollinate some especially good-flavored collards.
I’m diverting from previous practices this season and I’ll be direct sowing all my broccolis. I’ve sown one roughly 15’ x 3’ bed. I aim to sow two more of similar size via my haphazard direct sowing methods. My goal here is to keep trending toward direct sowing nearly all my Brassicas outside of Brussels Sprouts.
I will be planting the seeds in November. I had already planted from December and ran out if space. The GTS seed is available in February so I can plant this fall.
The birds were starting to snack, so I clipped stalks to finish drying inside. I only kept plants that had good flavor in spite of an unusually warm winter, and I didn’t make any efforts to isolate multiheading/sprouting type broccoli from purple collards. Would you like me to keep the two seeds separate to submit, or mix them in the same envelope?
IF you can, I think it would be very beneficial to keep the purple leafy collard seeds separate from
the broccoli heading types. We have isolated
the heading/sprouting broccolis from the leafy oleracea with the intent to at least attempt to differentiate the two phenotypic classes - if that makes sense. OR am I misunderstanding your ask here?
