Looks like our broccoli is coming in hot and heavy! So, it’s probably a good time to talk about what to expect and what’s important!
Broccoli is a very heat sensitive plant. It absolutely loves to flower, especially once it starts getting even a little bit of heat. It’s important to watch your plants fairly regularly once the head fully forms as the difference between a compact head and serious flowering is usually measured in days. It’s especially important to keep an eye on during heat streaks, but just having a broccoli head means that flowering can happen at any minute!
As for what you’re looking for? A head of broccoli can be technically harvested at any stage. If you see any yellow bits, that’s an imminent sign of flowering. Also, when you see head separation, that’s also an early sign of flowering. We generally prioritize those heads first. But, any heads that don’t show any sign of flowering or head separation, we’ll usually leave them to mature more fully. We often do multiple, large scale harvests of broccoli as it’s a home favorite in our preservation game.
You can still harvest and eat broccoli that has flowered, at least while it’s in the process of flowering. Some even prefer early flowering broccoli for its floral addition to the flavor. The flowers will slightly alter the taste, texture and experience. But, they are perfectly edible. Also, don’t count on refrigeration to arrest the flowering process. We’ve fully seen how flowering broccoli will continue to do so, even in full refrigeration! It’s generally best to harvest before flowering, if you can help it.
One of the important things we do with our broccoli crop is to diversify not just among varieties, but also maturity times. One of the ways we extend our crop is by planting a lot of late season varieties, such as 80 to 90 days. We’ve generally found these to be much more heat tolerant (or field hardy) than early and mid-season varieties. These days, a solid 60+% of our total crop are late season varieties.
For our early and mid-season varieties, one of the features we really like to see is when the plant grows side shoots. These are small broccoli heads that usually mature slightly behind the main head. These side shoots can significantly increase your total harvest amounts, especially when you have a respectable number of plants. We’d estimate a good 30% of our total broccoli preservation is of those side shoots!
Our earliest varieties are always our broccolini. We’ve definitely learned to limit how much of these we grow as it tends to flower faster than all other varieties. That said, a few plants of broccolini can definitely scratch that early broccoli itch. But, it’s this multi-prong maturity among different varieties that allow us to extend our harvests throughout our season.
We also generally plan to allow some of our broccoli to flower. Bees and other pollinators absolutely love broccoli flowers and they tend to be some of the most popular in our in-ground gardens. That’s also how we leverage those side shoots we mentioned earlier. Sometimes we’ll take the main head, a few shoots and leave the remainder to flower. Our broccoli flowers are definitely something to look at come late summer!
So much broccoli coming in here! We’re planning our first freezer preservation for this weekend, so we’ll be talking about all that soon! We’re so excited that our bulk crops are starting to come in and our season is shaping up very well on the broccoli front!
