All over the world, more and more people are starting to grow their vegetables at home and make their mark on the agricultural world of crops, fruits, and vegetables.
However, many people try to do this without doing any prior research and won’t know when their broccoli is ready to eat or even ripe! This makes your job so much harder, without the knowledge being known beforehand. That’s why we’re here!
If you somehow don’t know what broccoli is, then we’ll quickly explain it to you. Broccoli is a small vegetable, coming in a typical green color.
With a juicy and relatively neutral taste, many people love to include it on the side of their meals, or with a good salad.
There are lots of benefits to eating broccoli because the vegetable contains lots of vitamins and nutrients, which are crucial to anyone’s balanced diet. Being so healthy, these are great things to include in your five-a-day.
Growing Broccoli And The 4 Simple Steps
Much like similar vegetables like cabbage and cauliflower, broccoli is one of the easier vegetables to grow yourself, which is always nice to hear.
There are 4 basic stages of development throughout a broccoli’s life, which we’ll look at in more detail in this section of our guide.
All of these stages take around 50-70 days from start to finish, from seed to harvest.
The best time to plant one of these vegetables is around the springtime, usually in the earlier stage of the season.
This is because the spring frost has been and gone, with the ground fresh and ready for the vegetable to be planted.
The temperature is roughly 60-65 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a good temperature for your broccoli to grow.
Because of the time of year, depending on where you are, there should be a good mixture of rain and sun to help your broccoli to grow.
Stage 1 – Germination
Broccoli can be grown and harvested within a single year, which means that it is an annual vegetable.
This stage is the first of four in the life cycle of broccoli, where the seeds continue life surrounded by moisture, vitamins, a healthy amount of sunlight, and reasonable temperatures.
When planting the seeds, use a seed planting tray about six weeks before the spring frost disappears.
Alternatively, you could use a well-drained container that could be good enough to plant and facilitate seeds. These seeds should sprout within 5-10 days when the ideal temperature is between 65 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit.
Stage 2 – Seedlings
This is where we start to see some life in your broccoli! This usually lasts around a month with the structures of the vegetable starting to form.
These are crucial for broccoli to absorb water, food synthesis, and water. This is where we will see the stalk start to form and become present in the vegetable.
Once again, we recommend sticking to a temperature of around 60-65 degrees Fahrenheit.
The better you can control the temperatures and environment, the better results you’ll see in the quality and growth of your broccoli. Using a slow-releasing fertilizer will also allow your broccoli to thrive under your watchful eye.
You need to keep these plants indoors for around 3-4 weeks until they need transplanting into a larger container, or even in the garden.
Regular watering is a must and is crucial to the plant’s development, so make sure that this is completed frequently. Use your thumb and if the soil is dry, it probably needs watering. If it’s still moist, then it’s okay for now.
Stage 3 – Vegetative Stage
This is where the seedling will elongate and start to form a resemblance to what you might expect a young broccoli plant to look like.
The broccoli is old enough to take nutrients and water from the soil efficiently, whilst synthesizing sunlight using photosynthesis.
This stage is crucial to the growth and development of any broccoli vegetable. The same with all plants!
Use a low nitrogen fertilizer to ensure that the vegetable continues to grow and thrive. Nitrogen usually stunts the growth of the vegetable, which is something you don’t want.
Alternatively, using compost with high levels of carbon materials is a great way to keep your broccoli healthy.
Stage 4 – Flowering
This stage usually occurs a maximum of 65 days after the original planting takes place. It can also happen as early as 45 days from seeding.
If you’re growing for vegetable purposes, then you need to harvest the vegetable before flowers start to bloom. Once these flowers come in, you cannot harvest the vegetable. However, these seeds can be used for future cultivation.
Conclusion
Broccoli might not be as hard to grow as you might have first thought, however, it does take a lot of time and patience.
Of course, everyone knows that vegetables and plants don’t grow overnight, but broccoli doesn’t take nearly as much time to mature compared to other types of vegetables and plants.
Because of how versatile this vegetable is and how many different dishes it can be used in, there are a lot of perks for growing your version of the plant.
At the end of the day, it’s all a bit of fun and if there are results at the end of it, you’re in luck!
