Brassica oleracea var. italica
A member of the cabbage family.
The country of Italy features strongly with broccoli. The word is plural of ‘broccolo’, meaning ‘flowering sprouts of cabbage’. These sprouts are naturally thin and long, so broccoli is the result of breeding to increase their size and tenderness.
Types - There are three main ones, with significant differences in harvest amounts, size, types of size, and timing.
1. Calabrese
The largest and most tender broccoli, from Calabria, the southern toe of Italy’s boot shape on a map. A large domed head is your first pick, followed by side shoots over a few weeks.
2. Kaibroc
What I call ‘kaibroc’ is also called ‘brokali’ and ‘broccolini’, sometimes ‘tender stem broccoli’ too. It’s a hybrid cross of broccoli with kailaan or gai lan. The latter is sometimes called Chinese kale (Brassica oleracea, Alboglabra Group), an extremely fast-growing plant for harvests of flowering broccoli with thin stems.
Kaibroc’s stems are of medium thickness, and it can give the first harvest as quickly as two months from sowing. Late summer sowings crop well into winter if not too frosty.
- Another hybrid variation is Broccoli raab, or Cima di Rapa/Rapini (Brassica rapa var. Ruvo). More of this plant is edible than most of the broccoli here – the leaves are very tender while its shoots are smaller. It overwinters in temperate climates, for pest-free harvests in early spring. Summer sowing is less advisable, as shown in the second photo below.
3. Sprouting broccoli
Older strains of broccoli grow a medium-sized first head, followed by many smaller second stems over weeks, even months. With each succeeding pick, the stems are thinner and slightly more fibrous, plus greater in number. The flower buds may be green, white, or purple.
I use purple sprouting as the example in my video shown below, of the type which overwinters, to crop in late winter or early spring. The purple types are common, white ones less so, and they yield a little less too.
A variation is the Nine Star Perennial (photos below), which, in my view, is not a true perennial because it needs picking hard through spring to make sure no flowers remain. If left to flower through summer, I have found it less likely to survive. It’s interesting to compare it with perennial kale, which does not flower and keeps sending energy to the leaves in a seamless way, throughout the year.
Harvest period
- Days from seed to first harvest: 70 for kaibroc, 100–130 for calabrese, 170–300 for sprouting broccoli.
- Broccoli as an annual: June to November from two sowings.
- Broccoli overwintered: March to May.
- Best climate is warm not hot, with good moisture or water given; they tolerate freezing.
Why grow them
Continuous cropping is one of the biggest advantages. From one sowing, you can have a fine and large main head followed by side shoots for four to six weeks. Even for longer, especially if you don’t mind them being small and with thin stems.
- With homegrown broccoli, you can pick stems with more length than you might find in the shops. The sweetness is in the stems much more than in the buds. One old description of broccoli is ‘poor man’s asparagus’.
- You have seasonal choices, with harvests possible almost year-round in temperate climates. Broccoli plants are impressively cold resistant.
- An extra harvest is the leaves. The ones high up and closest to any broccoli buds are the most tender, just don’t take too many if you want plenty of broccoli.
Suitable for containers/shade?
Broccoli grows fine in shade, while for containers I suggest kaibroc because it is smaller. Or even kailaan, for harvests of flowering stems and leaves.
Varieties
- Hybrid varieties of calabrese give the large green heads you see in my photos, and I find only small variations between varieties. Try any of Belstar, Fiesta, Green Magic, Ironman and Marathon.
- Kaibroc/brokali are all hybrid varieties. Good ones are Apollo, Atlantis, Columbia and Royal Tenderette.
- For sprouting broccoli, check the small print about timings of harvest in any varietal description – they vary a lot. My favourite is Carmen F1, for harvests in early spring from sowings the previous summer.
Other good hybrids of sprouting broccoli are Rudoph, which crops mid-winter if not too cold, and Summer Purple, for harvests from midsummer through autumn. Hybrids give larger heads than the older open-pollinated varieties such as Early/Late Purple Sprouting, which are now often poorly maintained by seed companies. For white sprouting, try Burbank F1 to crop late winter, and Nine Star Perennial for early spring.
Clear
Straight after the last harvest, the best clearing method is to get hold of a main stem and keep twisting it, so that the large roots snap off. This leaves a lot of root in the ground which is good. There is some soil disturbance, and it’s worth walking on the uplifted soil to firm it down again.
Cut off all leaves to compost, leaving the woody and fibrous stem, which composts best either sliced or shredded.
- Shredders do a lovely job of both chopping and crushing the main stem.
- Slicing downwards is far easier than cutting across stem fibres, and even a penknife can manage the downward slice. The intention is to expose more surface area for microbes in the compost heap.
Follow with
After final harvests of summer broccoli and early kaibroc, you can transplant beetroot, salads, dwarf beans, carrots and leeks. Once, in July, I transplanted more broccoli after broccoli, and this worked fine.
Spring broccoli finishes in time for almost any succession, including courgettes, celeriac, and climbing beans