Let’s talk brassicas! The absolute workhorses of our cold climate, far northern gardens! We talk a lot about leaning into our cold climate, and by that, we grow a lot of brassicas!
In case the term brassica is not familiar to you, we’re talking about an entire family (or genus) of plants and it encompasses quite a few garden favorites. In that family, you’ll find things like broccoli, cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, collards, bok choy and kohlrabi. Curiously, you also find some root veggies in there like rutabaga and turnip.
Brassicas are a workhorse of the northern garden because they decidedly prefer cooler climates. When grown in warmer places, they tend to flower quite early and can produce somewhat marginally. So, it’s one of those plants us cold climate growers can do exceptionally well with. With such incredible diversity and strong compatibility with our climate, why wouldn’t you lean into them?
Since these plants are all within the same family, they also share near identical sowing requirements. All brassicas are sown 4 to 8 weeks prior to last frost. But, what we’ve learned over the years is that a lot of seeds, sown all at once, can really put some pressure on our indoor growing spaces.
We spread out our brassica sowing over several weeks. We start with Brussels sprouts, since these take the longest and really need every minute of our short growing season. The next week, we move into broccoli and the leafy greens like kale and collards. Our final sowings typically comprise of cabbage and whatever other stragglers we have.
What this does is ensure we don’t have hundreds of transplants to conduct, all at once. This also conserves indoor growing space, too, since we can be hardening off some of those early brassicas while our other brassicas are still coming up. By the time our new babies are ready to pot up, our earliest brassicas are out in the heated greenhouse.
We’ll have more to add on our various brassicas, soon. But, we figure we’d get this sowing strategy out there since it’s such a helpful one for our large gardens!
