“It’s cool that when we eat carrots we eat roots, and when we eat broccoli we eat flowers,” my son said.
That gave me the idea to do a post showing the lifecycle of broccoli, from seed to flower and beyond.
It starts with the seeds. Broccoli seeds are dark tiny balls.
I sow them shallowly in containers. Here are broccoli seedlings ready to be planted.
Once in the ground, they grow fast and large — three feet wide easily.
Then in the center of the plant, a head forms.
It looks like the broccoli you’ve always known. You slice its thick stem for harvest.
Eat it raw or roasted or however you want.
But for the remaining plant, the show goes on. It will now shoot up stems that produce multiple, small heads.
They don’t look like flowers, these heads big and small, but actually they are. What my son meant was that when we eat broccoli we eat flowers that simply haven’t opened yet: incipient flowers.
However, if you don’t harvest them . . .
And each flower can become a pod of seeds.
Inside the pods are the dark tiny balls, the same as you began with, and the same as you might start future broccoli plants with.
What about the rest of the plant? What becomes of it?
At my place it goes to the chickens.
Chickens love broccoli leaves.
That’s the cycle of life of broccoli, at least as it runs here in my yard.
At least when the pests are kept under control.
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That pest is pretty cute!
And hard to trap!