Well I just learned something today. This garden has been mostly good for me, I think, because I feel so ignorant when it comes to our food basics.
In the garden yesterday, I noticed our beautiful broccoli plants had turned into even more beautiful flowers. I asked Jim, if the blooms were going to turn into the broccoli we eat and he said it was too late.
Well, that answer was lacking a little in the "explanation department" so I pulled out the modern-day version of an encyclopedia, Google, and found out this:
"Broccoli is a vegetable that will flower unlike some other plants. The parts that we eat are called florets. Each floret has the potential of opening a tiny flower. When broccoli goes to flowering, it has bolted and is not edible. Bolting means the plant has finished its reproductive cycle and is now going to make seeds."
Now, that was off of Yahoo Answers so I'm not sure of its accuracy, but it sounds right and makes sense. We waited too long to harvest, but I learned a valuable lesson and it looks like we might be helping stock a honeycomb somewhere.
Some of the other information I've learned from this little gardening adventure:
- Mustard greens are a beautiful leaf. They remind me of a little girl's ruffled skirt. If they stayed around longer and weren't so scrumptious, they'd be a great landscaping plant for low, green, leafy coverage.
- Growing a garden in your back yard is fairly easy. I did start with low expectations too, so that might have helped.
- When carrots are seeded heavily (like Katherine likes to do), they grow very crooked because there's no room.
- Young potato leaves look like African violet leaves.
- Celery doesn't like to grow in our back yard.
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