Melbourne

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.