For our final “end of season” preparation, let’s talk Brussels sprouts! It’s super important in northern climates to manipulate the plant in order to get those Brussies to produce!
Most Brussels Sprouts are realistically 160 to 200 day plants, if grown out naturally. Even if your seed packet says otherwise! In more southern environments, sprouts are more often grown over the winter and they are exceptionally cold hardy, fully up to that task. In the north, though, we need to help them along or we won’t get those sprouts!
At around 30 days to our first frost, we top the plant. Again, this means we just cut off the growing tip. Like with tomatoes, this effectively stops all vertical growth. We want the plant to focus on producing those sprouts and this gives the plant nothing else to do other than to put energy into those sprouts.
Another thing we like to do is trim the bottom 2/3 of the plant’s leaves. Like a little furry faced poodle dog! Be careful not to trim too close, we don’t want to damage the sprouts! This offers the sprouts a lot more sunlight, which helps them in the photosynthesis process and will contribute to more sprout growth. It also reduces the amount of resources that the plant has to redirect into maintaining the leaves, ensuring all of that energy goes into the sprouts.
We’ll tell you, this is the only way to get fairly large sprouts on those northern Brussies. If you don’t do this, you’ll get measly little sprouts that are simply aren’t worth your time. But, if you do the above, you should get a decent amount of fairly large sprouts from your harvest.
You’ll start to observe the sprouts getting larger about two weeks after you perform this process. They’ll get bigger and bigger as the days go on! When it’s time to harvest, you’ll have plenty of fantastic Brussels sprouts to feast upon!
As for our harvest, Brussels sprouts are one of the very last things we harvest out of the garden. They can take plenty of frosts and even snowfall. We often pull ours out two or three weeks after our first frost in most seasons. We do want to avoid exposing them to hard frosts, so the timing isn’t “exact.” In particularly late seasons, sometimes we just harvest them out so we’re done with our gardens.
