Harvest Monday - 16th March 2015

Latest post from MARKSVEGPLOT – a blog about food and gardening in England”

Guess what? – I’ve been harvesting Purple Sprouting Broccoli again!

This little lot is the start of my second plant (out of a total of six). It is one of the “Red Spear” variety. Here it is before the snip:

I’m sure that most of my readers know this, but the “correct” way to harvest PSB is to cut the central head first – like this…

This is what the plant looks like after the central head has been removed:

The plant will now put its energy into side-shoots, like the ones shown at the right of the next photo:

As well as the PSB I also harvested the Perpetual Spinach that I wrote about yesterday:

And another handful of Landcress.

You don’t need large quantities of Landcress – a few leaves are quite sufficient to add a bit of zing to a salad, because they are pretty peppery, especially now, as the plants begin to form flowers.

Once the flowers begin to form, the production of new leaves slows right down and I normally dig up the plants and start again. It is possible to keep them going – the plants are short-lived perennials – but it will be a long time before there is anything useable again, so if like me you are short of space it is probably not justifiable to leave them in place.

This is my entry to Harvest Monday, hosted as ever on Daphne’s Dandelions. Please drop by and see what everyone else has been harvesting this week.

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P.S. Our daughter Emma and her family came over yesterday for a Mothers’ Day get-together. I gave her a bag of PSB to take away, because the plants are producing spears faster than Jane and I can eat them. The quality and quantity of the crop this year is first class.

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