Growing Cauliflower | Sowing, Spacing & Harvest Timing | No Dig Gardening

Cauliflower is a vegetable that you can grow right through the year. It can help to match the variety you're sowing to the time of year. Some do better in spring, some do better in autumn. Having said that, I have found over the years that there's not a huge difference actually. And the one I'm sowing today called White XL, I've had fantastic crops in the autumn from sowing in summer. I haven't tried it yet in the spring, but I'm pretty confident it's gonna give us a harvest by July. So I'm filling a little module tray. I'm gonna sow two seeds per cell. And some might say that's multi-sowing, which it kind of is, but what I'm gonna do is thin to the strongest. Because if you say you did grow two cauliflowers together in one space, so to speak, well, it would work. But I think, well, I know that you get two small ones, might be a bit more fiddly. You won't get that beautiful large cut, but if you wanted two small ones, and you had two in a clump, you could do that. It's like the beauty of vegetable growing or any plant really, that there's so many things you can try, so many different ways to do it slightly differently. Most of them work. It's more question, it's more about what you want as your end result. This compost is quite damp. If it was dry, I would push it in more, but I'm not gonna overdo it, keep it a bit aerated. It's mostly homemade compost with a bit of preparatory, which is lighter, and that keeps a bit more air in there. And I've just made indents really rather than sowing holes because the seeds are not enormous. And more than that, they are F1 hybrids. And this is the result of using a hybrid, not many seeds. If you look at the kohlrabi video that we're producing, you will see that the amount of seeds in a packet is much more than this, even though I was throwing a few away at the end. But with these, they're precious. I'm gonna count them out quite carefully, and I'm sowing just a few. I'm actually putting in, I'm aiming to put, ooh, that was four. I would do better to put one per cell actually. And then sometimes if you aim for one, you'll sometimes sow two. Because they're so small, it's not obvious to portion them out. Now I've got one or two left, I'm gonna double up. Ah, that is it. Gonna lift one or two out of these where I put too many. The main thing is that every cell has one. But we can't be sure that one is going to germinate. These seeds are a little bit erratic. And so, yeah, I'm happier if there's a spare one in there. And we'll see what happens. So we've got a range of average two per cell. And I might just put a tiny bit more compost on. You can see that this compost is not super fine. And that's okay. It means that in the compost itself, there's a bit of air, water can drain through more easily. I'm gonna water this next, and then let it drain and take it into the house. Because mid-February, the nights in the greenhouse here are pretty cold still. Cold nights are what slows germination. Or even stops it. Because the seed recognizes, no, it's too cold to come up yet. I'm not gonna succeed. So we're kind of bypassing that by putting them in the house for the germination phase. Then once we've got some leaves, they either need to come back in here or stay in there with some extra light. Because if you carry on growing seedlings on a windowsill, the shortage of light, because it's only from one side, will make them draw upwards and you get long thins, weak stem, difficult to handle. We'll come back. Hopefully there'll be some seedlings that, I don't know if we'll get time to fill the thinning, but I'm looking to have, we'll see 15 nice cauliflower plants to put in the ground in about five weeks time. Well, cauliflower seedlings, four weeks later. We've had quite a lot of cool weather, cold nights. And that's where germination in the house really helps. Then they've been out here for over two weeks now. Fantastic growth, a little while on the hotbed to speed things along for maybe a week and then 10 days on a unheated bench. Germination, really strong. I'm impressed with this. And it is a hybrid that helps white excel. And we've got some with doubles. As it happens, I'm a bit short of cauliflower seedlings. If I wasn't, I would just take out the weakest of the two and transplant the one, because it doesn't really work to multi-sow and grow two cauliflowers in a clump together. They need a lot of space and you'll get two small, really quite small curds, I reckon. Anyway, that's what I see of cauliflower. They do better on their own. But you could still, at this stage, separate them out. This is what I'm doing, pulling gently. I can hear a little bit of snapping there as some of the roots break, but you'll see them. Because the compost is nice and structured, look at that. That's very nice roots on both of these. And what I can do now is I've pre-filled this tray and I've got it really wet. And that makes it easier to create a hole that's not gonna fill in. And I'm using extra compost because I really have to mount it up a bit. I wanna get the stems, whenever you prick out, this would be the other way to grow cauliflower, sow them in a little tray and then prick them out. You can see me do that in the how to grow celery video, for example. And so this was unforeseen, but it's a way of having more cauliflower. So we will rejoin this in, I would estimate, between two and three weeks when these little seedlings will have turned into strong plants ready to go in the ground. There's a couple of things about pricking on, especially for brassicas, that they're tough little seedlings and probably you can tell that by how nicely they pull apart. I've actually watered this tray since starting because I realized that it is easier to do this if the compost is fully moist. And the other thing is that's so much compost there that it's actually quite difficult to get into that rather small hole. So I'm gently pulling off some of that compost to make it easier to get the roots in. It's the roots I'm worried about or want. And as deep as possible because you don't want a long stem on here and then a firm push as well. Brassicas, nevermind that. And what I've got now is enough that I'm not gonna use all of those cells, but I'll, actually will I? I'm just gonna put a bit of extra compost on these, actually the ones that are left, but there's one more I'll mention is this one. If you notice there's one, gosh, I better not pull this out. Do you see how that one is really weak? I'm gonna just pull it out because that, if you compare that to these two side by side, yeah, this is general principle of propagation. Seedlings that are much weaker, noticeably weaker, just bend them. I know it seems a bit hard, but because I thought I was gonna waste space in your beds, your garden, trying to grow something that's basically a weak seedling sadly. So just keep the strong ones. The cauliflower have grown nicely. And I actually potted on because I was waiting for this video to go into transplant at the same time. That's the white axel. From small cells to larger cells, but you can see the small cells do all right. That's all they've grown in. And here, just this morning even, there was this problem of a slug-eaten leaf. Couldn't believe it. And I looked underneath and there was the slug right there. Just shows how, you know, you gotta be so vigilant all the time. I will still transplant this one, but it's gonna take it a while longer. It's probably lost a week of growth from that amount of damage. And this is the purple graffiti cauliflower. So I'm gonna plant them all a bit together actually. And even there's one deli stem broccoli, which is a bit like a tender, tenderette. We'll see how that does just for comparison. They're all very closely related so you can grow them in the same way in the similar spacing even actually. And at the very end, I've got a few different kind of broccoli to fill up the bed because even on the wide spacing of cauliflower, which you're gonna see now, you will notice you still need a certain number of plants. It's quite a big bed. And this bed actually, until four days ago, or even yesterday morning, had some spinach. We harvested the last spinach yesterday and that was overwintered. You can see that in the video I put the link to actually, the spinach from last autumn. And before the spinach was purple sprouting broccoli, of which there's now some right there. So that's hopefully giving you a bit of an idea of succession of plantings as well. So what I decided, the spacing I've used in a bed like this, which is 1.2 meter, four foot wide, you could have four lines like that, three, four, but actually that for cauliflower, that's a little bit close. So I'm doing three lines, but the spacing is a little bit closer within each line. If that sounds a bit technical, don't worry too much. It's like getting your head around this spacings. It's good to have an overall picture. Precision is less important, but the two things to avoid is cramming them in so that you wouldn't get a decent collie curd or having them so wide that they're just never really gonna use all that space. And that's a waste of lovely compost and sunlight and everything. So these are the big ones and they're actually not very long stemmed. So they don't need to go in particularly deep. They're definitely gonna have some water at this time of year. They're quite fast at the bottom, not actually the easiest for planting. So I'm putting them in using my fingers a little bit just to pull. And this is no dig with, you can see the seven compost mulch on top, which we put on before the spinach. And so I'm not putting any more on now. Once a year I find usually is enough and I can still see plenty of it on the surface. And I'm not using any fertilizer either. It's all organic. This is the amazing plant considering how little root there is. Pop it in and push it down. And that's a good rule of thumb for all brassicas. You see how that's got quite a long stem. So it's good that I've made a deep hole. Really, and I'm really pushing it in and I'm not worrying to fill in the hole because that will happen with watering. I'm knocking out the unused compost or the plant's got even whatever. Start again. This module tray by the way, I might've used 10 times since it was new and I never wash it, never brush it, never sterilize it, heaven forbid. Don't do any of that. That's now ready to be refilled and reused. And so that's why these trays, any modules trays, you just don't need to do that despite what you might hear. So I'm going to carry on now and finish planting the bed with my other broccoli in fact. So we've got all cauliflower here and I'll then cover it with fleece over the top after watering. Probably water these transplants in maybe three days time. It's bright sun now and unusually dry for us. So watering is, you tailor it according to the weather. These cauliflower, say last year was a wet spring, didn't need any water at all. This year, I think it could be the other way around. And if you don't water cauliflower, you get quite a small result. So let's see what happens. And we'll pick this up maybe in a month or so, see how they've done under the fleece. I've just noticed how wilting and weak some of these cauliflower look only two days after transplanting. And we're having this unusual sunshine, for us unusual. I'm going to replace this with mesh. Mesh is not so warm, but it's the main job. It's not so much warmth I want for these. It's keeping off the insects and the rabbits. Here we are with the same plants on the 6th of June. Beautiful weather. A beautiful weather for growing brassicas in particular. If you wanted to be on a beach today, this might not be the most perfect weather because it's actually a relatively cool wind. Brassicas like it, temperate climate, not too hot, certainly not above 30 centigrade too often. And they like it damp. And we've just had some rain. We've had in this week around 20 mil, four fifths of an inch of rain. Plus we've been watering before that. And when we were watering before that, we were watering through the mesh. So this had the mesh cover on until just a week ago. So for 95% of their life, these plants have been undercover. They're open to air now. Well, they're open to air under the mesh actually. It just mitigates the wind, keeps the insects off more than anything. But as they get towards harvest, particularly cauliflowers, it's a lot easier if you don't have a cover in the way because one thing you can see more clearly what's going on, and it's not always obvious at first where a cauliflower is developing. Similar for broccoli calabrese actually, there's some calabrese there, which within a week will be ready, a nice big dome calabrese. They're very closely related. And that is some tender stem broccoli calabrese, again, very closely related. We're looking specifically here at cauliflower. And the peculiarity of cauliflowers is how the harvest is very specific. And once off, it's a one only harvest. There's no repeat. And this is it. So I've been watching this one for a few days. And I don't know if you can see, but this plant is actually quite a bit smaller than say this one. The one next to it is probably twice the size. And that's why this cauliflower is not enormous. So just because you see a cauliflower and it's still small, it doesn't mean it's maybe not ready. Whereas this one, I would expect to make a larger cauliflower and if I have a quick look, you can peel the central leaves back a bit and see what's going on in there. That gives you an idea when a cauliflower might be going to happen. And I can't go any further without breaking the leaves, but there is a tiny, tiny, tiny cauliflower in there, which maybe 10 days, two weeks. So from here, 6th of June in this case, we could be harvesting cauliflowers from this bed for another three weeks. And that's what I'm hoping. They won't all come at once. It's nice when they're staggered a bit. Even though this is an F1 hybrid white XL, I do find that they're kind of bred to be a bit uniform, but they do have a length of time for harvest. And the ones further up, the purple graffiti, beautiful cauliflower, but they take a little bit longer again. So that's why I'm confident that we're going to have a nice harvest over quite a long period. So how do you harvest them? Well, before that, I actually put a leaf over. This is not obligatory thing to do, but it helps to keep the light off and the heat off. If you've already got a cauliflower and you're not wanting or ready to eat it for a day or two or three. And it's more about keeping off light. It won't slow down the growth because if you, at this stage, this is pretty much perfectly ready. If you left this another week, it might get a tiny bit bigger, but more than anything, it's going to kind of erupt upwards and outwards into open florets, rather like mini broccolis. This is the kind of concentrated curd flower stage. So just don't leave it too long. I'm amazed how many questions I get on social media, actually, and this is partly what makes me say. People send me a photo and they say, is my cauliflower ready yet? And I say, well, sadly, it was ready 10 days ago. They just hadn't spotted it or realized and it has gone through that kind of eruption phase. And what happens then is that the stems get quite tough. There's still edible food there, but you might want to cut away the base, which has got a bit woody. So because this is a one-off, I'm going to take these leaves off just so you can see more clearly really what I'm doing. There is the cauliflower in all its glory and not a good meal for two or three people, maybe. So I'm going to cut anywhere in the stem. Actually, you could cut lower than this because this is a probably pretty typical level to cut at. Just seeing a slug there as well, that's pretty typical. If you leave them a long time, they can get quite full of slugs sometimes if the weather's wet, but they'll wash out before cooking. And this is edible. I should have said actually, certainly these leaves, they're tasty as well. They're like broccoli leaves, good to eat. Maybe the central stalky bit, you just cut that away. But that's all good to eat. And in fact, yeah, I found this one more leaf on. Took this off just for the filming, but quite often I would cut them something like that. So that's the finished product, so to speak. And do with it whatever you like. When cooking cauliflower, I mean, you can eat them raw. Very nice with a dip. I like them just steamed a bit, two, three minutes at the most, just so they go a bit soft. And yeah, I reckon that'll be delicious. So this is the first cauliflower of the year. Exciting moment.