Growing Broccoli

A couple years ago I got to make my first attempt at growing broccoli.  Shortly after we moved west we stared our "little" garden with a bunch of plants from a local nursery.  I had never grown broccoli before and I wasn't quite sure what I was doing. 

My first lesson was that my homegrown broccoli wasn't going to look like the huge heads that you buy from the grocery store.  As I watched the first shoots grow I couldn't wait for them to get big enough to harvest.  Then they started doing something weird.  The shoots didn't stay tight and compact.  In our summer heat they started to bolt - meaning they got long and lanky and the buds decided it was time to make flowers.  That was all well and good, but opened broccoli flowers don't taste quite as good as the compact heads of the young, unopened flowers to be that we all think of when you mention broccoli.  In fact, they taste quite bitter if you wait too long to harvest them, and if you let them go to flower, the plants will just stop making more flowers because they think that their work is done for the season.  So my first lesson was that I need to cut off any florets that look like they are bolting.  That even means that the main crop of large heads of broccoli may need to be harvested long before they ever reach the size you would like them to be. 

The nice thing about broccoli is that even after you cut off the main shoot, the plants will go on producing numerous little side shoots that make bunches of florets.  The hard part is keeping up with the harvesting of the side shoots.  Sure the first few rounds don't make very many florets, but by the end of the season, the plants can be huge and finding every little floret becomes an enormous task.  They like to hide beneath the large shady leaves of older shoots.  Many of them go unnoticed until they bolt and have to be cut off just to extend the harvest season.  Lucky for me, the chickens don't care how bitter the flowers are, they just love to eat any of the florets I am willing to part with.

As for storing my harvests of this lovely plant, we resorted to freezing them that first year.  A quick blanch for five minutes, then dried briefly and into the freezer they went.  Last year we tried to dehydrate them as well, which worked better than I thought, but after reconstituting them some were very bitter.  This year I will probably go back to just freezing what we can't use fresh since it doesn't change the flavor too much.