Brassicas Planted

If you've been following this blog for very long, you'll know that I'm always reluctant to try to grow anything in the brassica family, due to the profusion of slugs and snails, flea beetles, cabbage white butterflies and pigeons round here. Between them all, they really make it pretty pointless.

But this year, despite promising I was going to make things easy for myself, I have tentatively grown a few broccoli seedlings, and splashed out on a real proper brassica cage to try to protect them. And here it is, newly installed and filled with plants:

It looks a bit of a monstrosity really, and I hate having to do this sort of thing, but if I can finally try some purple sprouting broccoli next spring it will be worth it.

There are two purple sprouting broccoli plants, two white sprouting broccoli, and six summer-maturing broccoli, which I'm sure must really be calabrese. They are still quite small, as they were sown as an afterthought, but fingers crossed...

When we put the cage up I had to move a few onions which were planted too close to the edge of their bed (i.e. in the brassica bed), and in doing so discovered this:

More white rot? The first year here I had none at all, but it just seems to spread and spread! Luckily it only seems to get the odd plant here and there, but I always fear it will get worse...