Broccoli is my most productive winter crop every year. I generally plant six ‘Premium Crop’ broccoli seedlings in a two week succession.

They are spaced only 15 inches apart in two foot raised beds with very rich soil.

I mulch them with some grass clippings topped with pine needles. I rarely have weeds because of the plant shading and the soil holds the moisture from rain or irrigation. My sun field is suboptimal—generally only four to five hours daily because of structures and trees that surround my garden but the plants are still very healthy and productive.

My broccoli heads are usually 8 to 12 inches in diameter, dense and heavy.

Harvest of the main head is followed by one to two months of side shoots which do get smaller as time goes by. So we eat broccoli for many months is the winter.

So here’s what I did wrong this year. My first big mistake was to spray the broccoli leaves with BT for the cabbage worms on a warm sunny day. Then I covered the plants loosely with row cover to exclude more cabbage moths. I created a little greenhouse that severely damaged the broccoli leaves. Everything got worse after that.

The white areas died and the plants looked horrible and had less photosynthetic area when they should have been growing vigorously. I used liquid seaweed and fish emulsion fertilizer to stimulate new growth and they did make somewhat of a recovery. However, around that time I had critter attacks in the garden, eating my broccoli, red cabbage and cauliflower plants. It was likely raccoons and/or rats so I needed to protect the plants.

I didn’t have metal screening high enough to cover the plants so I used a thin material to exclude rats. It did seem to work and the plants recovered to produce small heads. But this was my second mistake as I excluded the beneficial insects that would be my soldiers in the aphids war.

A few days ago I harvested all of the broccoli—main heads and side shoots which were dense with gray aphids. I washed them vigorously but we’ve cooked the broccoli with more aphids than I’d care to eat. I removed all the broccoli plants but also noted that in the next raised bed, two feet away the cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli and kale plants were free of any aphids. The beneficials were able to access the plants through the large holes in bird netting that was protecting the plants from critters.

So what did I learn? Unfortunately, things I already knew but ignored.
1. If you’re spraying plants with BT or other organic solution do so in the cool of the day and don’t create a greenhouse with a row cover.
2. Encourage beneficials like hover flies, lady bugs, lace wings in your garden (as I’ve always done).
3. Be even more aggressive with trapping of critters and realize that likely the population surge is related to last winter’s rains.
4. Some garden years are like that.