this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Thank youuuuu!!
Possums, thankfully (and touch wood) aren’t a problem here. There is some kind of animal that started having a munch on my plants, but I’ve worked out that if there are sweet peas, that it beelines for that and leaves everything else alone, so I have a small part of my flowerbed stocked with sacrificial sweet peas haha. It works so far. Slugs are a problem though, way more than caterpillars. Every morning I go and inspect it with my cuppa and wipe the underside of the leaves. There’s almost always little caterpillar eggs on them, so I nip them in the bud before they can become an issue. There’s not much I can do about the slugs and snails though. I put the gel barrier down and keep it mulched because they apparently don’t like crossing mulch, but if I go out there at night I can almost always pick two or three out of the bed. The broccoli heads are starting to get big enough now that I’ll start protecting them at night: you just have to wrap a bit of foil over the top at night and take it off in the morning. It stops anything from getting to the actual broccoli.
I do have broad beans too! And sugar snap peas. I don’t have much luck with beans and peas either. I never get more than a handful of sugar snap peas, even though the plant itself is really healthy. It’s my first time growing broad beans and I head they were easy. They’re going really well and again, the plant is really healthy, heaps of flowers, but no actual beans, so idk 🤷♀️
O wise one of the brassicaceae, I am deeply grateful for the sharing of your sacred knowledge! 🙇 No seriously I just figured it was utterly not worth the time to grow brassicas unless you had an enclosure. I am just gobsmacked at how well you've picked the caterpillar eggs off the leaves every time - and with so many plants. I used to do it with my morning cuppa too at my old house, but either I attract mutant caterpillars or I'm just not very thorough because my broccoli leaves were far less intact than yours. (and at least 30% of what I planted didn't make it to the flowering stage)
But the foil! I had no idea about the foil. I will definitely give that a go whenever I next try growing broccoli or cauliflower. Thank you for sharing that tip, I can't believe I'd never heard of it before.
I tend to have better luck with snow peas than sugar snap. And with certain varieties over others. There's this dwarf snow pea I grow in pots on the balcony and when it's late winter to early summer and the specific spot I plant it gets full but not overly intense sun, I get heaps of peas. I confess though I've never made anything with them because I've eaten every single one raw off the vine, they're so good 😻
Broad beans in my experience are easy, in that they're not as prone to pests and diseases, and as long as they're growing close enough to each other that you can sort of tie them in a bundle with a stake or fence for support, (and even then they'll still bear fruit if they're flopping about) they're pretty much set and forget. But they can take their time. I had given up on mine at my old place: sown in early autumn, they were growing directly in the ground in painstakingly cultivated yet still very clayey soil where nothing would germinate - just kept slowly growing for months with great leaves and eventually flowers but no apparent beans, so I kind of forgot about them until I was cleaning out the garden in October preparing to leave... and holy shit when I went to cut them down I was just drowning in pods that were all growing on the inside of the patch! I ended up taking my whole harvest to a friend's place and we just shelled them for 2 hours. We ended up with like 1 solid kilo of fresh, depodded beans. It was very satisfying.