How to Grow Brussel Sprouts - Complete Growing Guide

we'll hello everyone and welcome to another absolutely beautiful day here in the mi Gardener garden hopefully all are going to enjoy this episode this one is going to be complete growing guide on brussel sprouts this has been one of our most requested growing guides for this year and I wanted to make sure that that that they were ready to really show that's why it's taken a while to get to this that to get to this episode because really brussel sprouts are Brassica much like broccoli and cauliflower and cabbage and we have growing guides on those that pertains to to brussel sprouts as well so I'm going to go very quickly through that episode or through that part of the the growing guide getting it to this stage because it is a very easy one to grow and we have lots of videos that go more in depth in growing brassicas but there's one specific step to getting brussel sprouts to grow that does not apply together to the other ones because um they're just you know they're unique like like all vegetables are but these are a little exceptional unique because it takes a one extra step so uh what we want to do first is talk about you know nutrients sunlight water soil stuff like that that we talked about you know in all the growing guys because I wanted to be a complete growing guide so these are cold weather crop meaning that you can grow these from spring until the last frost in fact it's actually advised to let them go that long Brussels sprouts are a very long-term grow they do not mature very quickly we're talking 110 to 130 days for Brussels sprouts solely for the fact that you want to get the plant built up this is a huge plant by the way this is a massive Brussels sprout plant and the leaves on this thing are just insane so looking really good but um you want to give it a long time to mature next thing you want to do is you want to give it between five and seven hours of Sun I find that the more Sun you give it the bigger the plant will get and the faster it will start to produce brussel sprouts that means the faster it starts producing brussel sprouts the larger they will get because brussel sprouts are actually side shoots and I'll show you what I mean in a second Brussels sprouts grow in between the leaf nodes of your Brussels sprout plant so the taller you can get it the more Brussels sprouts you can get and obviously the sooner the Brussels sprouts start forming the bigger they get so if you have a really tall really early plant you're going to get a bountiful harvest of Brussels sprouts now what I will say is that there are nitrogen hogging these are some of the most nitrogen talking plants in the garden you got to give them nitrogen if you don't they're not going to produce the nice green leaves are not going to grow as fast they're not going to produce the Brussels sprouts which you are obviously eating so lots of nitrogen we give that trifecta plots just like you do everything in the garden it loves it what we do is we also follow up midway through the season we don't do this typically because trifecta actually feeds all season long but we like to keep the really high potent nutrients the fast-acting ones in the soil free so will actually come back about mid season around mid to late mid to late July and follow up with some more trifecta to get these plants boosted again so we actually feed these twice a year here and and it absolutely loves it so the next thing is the soil type you want a very loose well draining soil but you don't want it too loose because these are brassicas and brassicas are very prone to club root we talked about this a lot very much in depth in uh in the broccoli growing guide that we've done because Club root plagues um both caught the the cauliflower broccoli and and cabbage as well as the Brussels sprouts all the same the way to alleviate that is by packing down the soil when you plant your plants you want to pack down the soil whether you're starting from seed or from start you want to press the soil down and I actually show you how to do that in that groin guide so I recommend you go on and check it out but I actually take my foot and step the soil down if you have the right type of soil it won't actually compact to the point where it's harmful for the plant we'll just get rid of those air pockets which are one of the ways that plants can conduct club roots so there's that now the next thing is watering we really do not water that often here in the garden because we use what's called coir gardening I've got a couple videos coming up on that and core gardening is essentially where we where we dig a a trench about now 8 to 10 inches deep fill it with straw rotting straw and then and then pile it back up and plant on top of that in it what it does is it holding that moisture so we don't have to water that often if you use that method I don't think you'll have to water is often either depending on your climate your location but I think it we also got rain here too we water that the Brussels sprouts did get is just rain water and we did water in the early season as well to kind of charge the core of the of the core gardening the beds and so we did water um and I would have to say maybe like a half a gallon a week if I was being honest so I'm not that much water at all and the plants are doing fine so now we've talking about all those I want to talk about oh and spacing I'm spacing is a little important just because you don't want them to get powdery mildew or rot and and the thing is that the the plants they look very close together here that's just because they've grown up very close we grow very high intensity here the high intensity gardening method is by far the most productive method but you have to be careful not to space them too close because otherwise you're going to add actually end up hurting your plants so we've spaced ours about I'd say 10 inches apart no more than that yeah right about 10 10 to 11 inches I guess to be fair so that's spacing now I want to talk about the specific step here because it's very important and it's very crucial to getting your Brussels sprouts to form so come on close I'll show you what Brussels sprouts are when they're just teeny tiny and what they look like and and how to get them to start forming because it's a very simple tip that I know all of you will be able to benefit from that are looking to grow your Brussels sprouts wanna close check this out now general rule of thumb is about 50 to 60 days before your first frost you want to do this so if obviously waited later that's fine you might not get as large your Brussels sprouts but the general rule is about 50 to 60 days and what that what that basically does is it signals to the plant that it is in shock and it is going to come under shock by leaf removal and what you want to do is you want to come through here and just snap these leaves off snap them off don't snap too close to the stem because you'll break those brussel sprouts I typically break about a half inch away from this from the stem and essentially where the plant naturally breaks I just bend I grab it here and bend it and wherever it breaks that's where that's where I let it break and you want to break them all the way up to the plant leaving just the top I guess the top to three inches of of leaves and so you can see there's a couple little tiny Brussels sprouts there but those are too immature to form anyways so I leave those and this produces energy for the plant this still allows the plant to stay alive and so I figured I'd close by this plant that I did about Oh 30 days ago or so and so we were a little bit in the late late in the game for those plants over there but I did this I did this plant about 30 days ago and you can see that the Brussels sprouts are about double in size so I definitely think that that we're going to have some nice Brussels sprouts this year this plant was exceptionally large as you can see and may I love Brussels sprouts braised in some red wine it's just the way to go and man just nothing beats the flavor so hopefully I'll enjoy and hopefully you all try Brussels sprouts I think it is something that gets a really bad rap because you cannot taste them frozen you've got to taste them fresh and you got to taste them from the garden because nothing ever taste is fresh and is awesome as it does right from the garden so please do not taste it frozen from the store if you did get tasted if you did taste it frozen from the store I apologize it probably tainted your idea of them is certainly tainted mine because I used to I used to be forced to eat Brussels sprouts frozen from the frozen from the store and tasted them a couple times and absolutely hated it for life until I decided I would just buck up and just try some fresh ones that were served to me at a restaurant because I don't want to be rude to my date aka Cindy and so I just got a I was like oh man so I tried them and I loved them so you got to try them fresh you got to try them farm-fresh it's just the only way to go so anyways hopefully I'll enjoy hopefully I'll learn something new let me know in the comments box below if you enjoyed this one and also remember to check out our other growing guys we have over 20 I think 25 of them now like we have a ton of growing guides go check them out Anna my garter not calm under the media section you have videos and then growing guides you're going to check them all out there or we have a playlist here on YouTube that you can check out as well on our main page that's just the EMA youtube.com slash I'm a gardener where you're see essentially where you're seeing this video on and go there we have a playlist and and it's somewhere on the home page there and you can find it and it will hopefully help you out grow more food at home have more fun doing it and grow more food successfully okay I'll catch you later rubber to rubber your go home see ya bye you

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 626,415

Keywords: howto, how-to, start to finish, how to, growing, migardener.com, growing guide, brussel sprouts, Premiere_Elements_14, complete, migardener, guide

Id: N46a4sc0G6c

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 02 2016