So, yesterday, we talked about “force maturing” tomatoes. Well, there’s another crop we can do this with! If you’re aiming to get Brussels spouts this season, this will help you a lot!
Despite seed maker’s claims, most Brussels sprouts will take their sweet little time to mature. Hopefully you at least tried to get 120-ish day varieties, but with Brussies it’s not uncommon to see 160 to 200+ day maturity times! We don’t have that kind of time in our season! So, to help them along, we can lightly manipulate them to help focus their growth.
First, we cut the top of the plant right off. Like with tomatoes, this arrests further growth and helps the plant focus on producing sprouts. Unlike tomatoes, though, those Brussies aren’t going to start growing in weird places. They’re pretty much like, “Oh, OK, how about sprouts then?”
The other thing we do is trim off the lower leaves. Typically, we’re aiming for about half to two thirds of the lower half of the plant. We’re making little poodle dogs out of our plants. When you do this, you want to be careful not to knick where the branch meets the stem as this is where your sprouts will come from!
This latter step helps the sun hit those sprouts, which encourages photosynthesis and further growth of the sprouts. It will also increase airflow, which will reduce pests and other kinds of problems late season growth can produce.
We keep fertilizing our plants right up until about two weeks to last frost. We want to keep them well fueled as we’re in a race with hard frosts to get these plants done. As usual, we like water soluble fertilizers so they promote immediate results and fast growth. Brussels sprouts absolutely love the cool weather, so don’t worry one bit!
As for timing of our harvests, this crop is one of our last to come out of the garden. Even with all the manipulation and late season plant fuel, those sprouts need every minute of time we can give them. They are exceptionally cold tolerant, so our goal is to harvest once we regularly start seeing mid 20’s or so. But, really, once those sprouts look “normal” sized, you can harvest at any time.
If you avoid these steps, chances are good you’ll get some very anemic looking sprouts. Year after year, we pull a massive haul of Brussels and these steps are a huge part of it! Keep in mind that Brussels sprouts are more commonly grown over the winter months at lower latitudes, we’re fortunate to fit them into our short summer seasons!
