Potting-up the PSB

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My Purple Sprouting Broccoli plants, sown on May 20th, had got big enough to transplant, so they have now been moved to individual 6-inch / 15cm pots. I reckon they are big enough to do this once they have at least one pair of proper leaves (not including the cotyledons or seed-leaves).

In view of my ongoing problems with commercial compost, I am using ordinary garden soil this time. Each seedling is planted very deeply in its pot, with the soil-level being just below the first pair of leaves. During this process the strongest 3 seedlings of each type were kept and the weakest two were discarded – except in the case of “Red Arrow”, of which I only had two seedlings anyway. This means that I now have 14 plants.

Immediately after potting-up, the little plants were watered and placed in a shady spot for a few hours to help them get over the shock of their sudden upheaval.

In due course, I will have to whittle down the 14 plants to 4 or 5 at most (maybe one of each of the 5 varieties?) because I definitely won’t have space to grow any more than that. I always like to have plenty of spares because some of them may not do so well and some of them may succumb to attack by the dreaded Cabbage Root Fly.

In order to protect the young plants from the Cabbage Root Fly, I have constructed an “annexe” to the raised bed currently housing carrots and parsnips. It is covered with a length of Enviromesh, which was rolled-up because it was too long. Now I have unrolled it to its full length and draped it over a cube made from my kit of aluminium rods and plastic joiners:

So here it is with the trays of PSB plants inside, hopefully well protected!

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