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There are two types of broccoli and to
save confusion between them the type that is like a hardy cauliflower
has been put with the cauliflowers, leaving the sprouting broccoli here
because it deserves a place on its own.
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Broccoli is very easy. The winter kinds
are hardy, they resist club-root, and even though they can have it
badly they will always grow a crop. All are available over a long
period from a single planting and offer excellent value in vitamins for
the least trouble and space. The following tables give their
nutritional value compared with that of other members of the cabbage
tribe, cooked and raw, with lettuce and spinach as standards. These are
not meant to be used in working out diets to within micrograms, but
purely for comparison. Varieties differ in content and vitamins go up
and down with the season and soil, and though it would be possible to
analyze all the current British vegetable varieties through the year
for the cost of one really lavish Top Star' program on T.V., we must
still depend on averages from standard reference works.
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In these tables the vitamins are given in
the usual units so that those with a knowledge of nutrition can fit
them on to the tables in their favorite authorities on diet. Micrograms
are millionths of a gram in 100 grams (113 grams = 4 oz.), milligrams
are thousandths of a gram, and 'I.U.'s' are International Units used
for measuring vitamin A, which, like barley measured by the 'coombe',
is odd man out.
The most striking figures in these tables are the 595 milligrams of
calcium and 4.0 for iron in spinach, which led to the Popeye
propaganda. It is now known, however, that spinach contains so much
oxalic acid that this locks up all that it brings and even more from
the body's reserves, so it operates on a nutritional overdraft-it holds
less than none at all. It is, however, rich in vitamin A compared with
cabbage, especially eaten raw.
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Broccoli shows as one of the best of all
the cabbage family, with Kale a runner-up, but not nearly so nice
either raw or cooked; and its iron and calcium are uncomplicated, also
there is a high content of pantothenic acid. This is one of the B
complex, and the ingredient in the bee's 'Royal Jelly' that started the
craze for this substance. A lack of pantothenic acid can cause foot
troubles, or rather increase the pain from them, especially corns and
bunions, and this acid also helps the adrenal glands. There is no need
to go short of it when it is so easy to grow your own.
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All these crops, including spinach,
contain sulphur which our bodies need, but long cooking breaks down the
compounds and make a smell. The traditional cabbage-water smell 01' a
cheap boardinghouse conies from overcooked cabbage-tribe vegetables.
Cook only ten minutes with little water (see the last chapter for
recipes), thus banishing the smell, improving the flavor and saving the
vitamins.
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The most useful broccoli is 'Early White'
or 'Early Purple Sprouting', because it is ready to pick at the end of
February and finishes as late as May with time to clear the bed for
outdoor tomatoes, or late beet or carrots. Like Brussels sprouts it
needs firm ground and goes best after peas or broad beans without
digging. The late varieties are ready in April and can carry on until
the end of June, when yellow shows in the flower sprouts and these
become unattractive at last.
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Sow the seed, which should produce 2,000
plants to an ounce, in April-sow very thinly, remembering that seed
will keep for five years, so write the date on the packet and put it
away rather than overcrowd for the sake of using it up. The seedlings
will be up fast in their half-inch deep furrow and when they are four
inches high they should be transplanted to a seed bed four inches apart
each way to wait until July when the earlier crops will have freed
their room.
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Broccoli need plenty of space, not only
for growth but for picking between, eighteen inches to two feet between
plants and two to three feet between rows, which are the normal spacing
between pea and broad bean rows. Use a steel-shod dibber to make large
holes and transplant with as much soil on the roots as possible. Water
them thoroughly, ideally using an overhead irrigator to give them a
thorough soaking, if they must go out in a dry spell. They will manage
very nicely on the lime and compost that went in the pea trenches,
which will have sunk enough to hold water round them, and if the beans
are cut off level with the ground, their left-in roots will provide
nitrogen for the broccoli, which is always hardy through the worst
winters with this firm treatment. Hoe the weeds off the surface before
planting, and because broccoli are rarely attacked by slugs in winter
it is possible to cover down between plants and rows with a two-inch
coat of lawn mowing to suppress weeds.
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In new gardens broccoli can be planted
after merely taking the turf up, without digging at all, but 1 lb. of
lime a square yard should be scattered on the surface for the rain to
wash in. After early potatoes they should be planted at the same
spacing when the ground has been limed, as directed in Chapter 4, and
trodden firm, hut unlike cabbage they are better without a quantity of
manure. On rich soils or those that have had plenty of compost, they
may well need staking with something strong enough to come thirty
inches up the stem and hold them, for they grow between three and four
feet high.
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The eating part is the flowering shoot
that springs from where the leaves join the stem, and the central one
should be cut out first with about six inches of stem. Always leave a
stump of shoot to grow more, never damage the leaves, and never strip a
plant completely. It is better to have a dozen plants with room to walk
round and pick from them all than to waste room on twenty or more and
have some get away and flower.
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The 'Green Sprouting Broccoli' is also
called 'Calabrese', and is sown in April to plant out in late May and
be ready to pick forty days after planting, if you plant 'Green Comet',
the newest variety. Space it eighteen inches apart and two feet between
rows, and be ready to pick as soon as you see the small flowerheads
like green cauliflower curds in small fragments in the centre. This is
a very good subject for deep-freezing, but there is no point in using
up this expensive space, which could be filled with strawberries that
cannot be otherwise preserved, with a crop that can be grown as easily
outside.
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Advice to freeze this crop comes from
American books and the very large number of writers who merely copy
them, for in the U.S.A. it is rarely possible to keep the cabbage tribe
in the open through the winter as we can.
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