THE SECRET TO GROWING BIG BRUSSELS SPROUTS!

so choosing the right variety and having some cold weather helped us get to this point here but I think the most important factor that led to Our Success this year the best brussels sprouts we've ever grown has to do with it what's up Lazy Dog fam of everybody out there is having a wonderful day it is Sunday February 19th here in South Georgia and it feels like spring out here it's been a great weekend to work outside in and around the garden got my grass cut yesterday got my barn cleaned up got my limb pile burned and it just feels like spring now we probably still have a few little cold spells to work through before we can do any warm season planting we're getting pretty close now on today's video we're going to harvest what I think is probably the best brussels sprouts we have ever grown they're right over here behind me so I'm going to show you those tell you why they're the best ones we've ever grown we're going to look at the results of our experiment comparing cutting the side leaves versus leaving them alone and then I'm going to tell you you know what things I think led to Our Success this year growing the best brussels sprouts we've ever girl so here we are we've got two 30 foot rows of Brussels sprouts it's the only thing left in this plot from all the stuff we planted here back in the fall these things take a lot of patience they take a lot of time so we transplanted these back in early to mid-october here it is towards the end of February so they've been in the ground somewhere between 120 and 150 days now as we look at these you'll notice that I've got a few plants that look like this right here not a lot of them probably only about I don't know five or six amongst all the plants in these two 30 foot rows and I'm not really sure what happened here the sprouts look filled out there but it's like the top just fell out of them or rotted out don't know what causes that but thankfully it's only just a few plants and most of them look like those right there so for these good-looking plants here these are by far the tallest Brussels sprout plants I have ever grown still not quite as tall as those pretty plants you see that are grown out in California but these are about three foot tall some of them might be close to three and a half foot tall now some of these down there at the end of the row are probably two and a half three foot tall but these up here look really really nice and if we take a closer look I can show you here dig in there you can see we've got some really nice even Sprout development all along that stalk now with these plants one thing we could have done that we didn't do something we tried in years past we didn't do it this year is cut the top out of these plants and supposedly what that does is give you more even Sprout development makes the Sprouts more full along the stalk as opposed to the bottom Sprouts being larger and the ones towards the top being smaller now hard to tell until we Harvest some of these cut off all these side leaves but I don't think that would have mattered a whole lot looks like we got pretty good Sprout production almost all the way to the top so maybe we could have improved it even more if we would have cut the top side of them but I don't think that is necessarily the Ultimate key to success with brussels sprouts we'll talk about that more in a minute now let's look at our side by side experiment of pruning these side leaves versus just leaving them alone and letting them grow so looking at these two rows here this row on the left is the one that we pruned actually twice came in here with our Clippers and then cut the limbs all the way to the top but cut a good majority of them about two-thirds away of the plant these over here didn't do anything with those at all we just let them grow now it seems like the results of this are a little bit counter-intuitive to me you would think trimming the side limbs would make the plant get taller but it's not what happened at all these plants over here that we left alone are actually taller and look a lot better than these over here that we prune now the the siding factor is going to be looking at the actual Sprout development here in a minute so for a fair comparison here we need to get more than one stalk per row or per treatment that we did so I'm going to pick out some of the taller some of the better looking plants from each row and just going to go down here with my pruners clip them off this one here looks pretty good put that one off and then I'll go ahead and grab this one right here too and then we'll do the same thing with these plants that we didn't prune get some of the better looking ones out of here that way we can compare all right so we got three plants from the prune row man don't those look pretty right there and then three plants from the unproven row those look pretty too let's get these cleaned up get some of these leaves taken off of here and then we'll be able to compare them a little better all right so we got those six stalks cleaned up there now if we want to get real scientific with this we could measure how long the stalks are or how far up the stalks we've got some good Sprout production we could pick all the Sprouts off count them weigh them and get really quantitative with it but for our purposes here we're going to stick with a qualitative analysis so right here we have three stalks from the plants we pruned right here we have three stalks from the plants we didn't prune now the stalks themselves look pretty much equal in height can't see a huge difference difference between the height and the stalks the main difference I see is that these over here from the unpruned plants are filled out a lot better and a lot bigger than these over here it's not a considerable difference not a stark difference but these from the unpruned plants do look a little bit better than these over here both of them have nice Sprouts on them both of them would be good groceries but I'm leaning towards that like in that a little more than liking that so it's nice to get some conclusive results from that experiment which are that the unproven ones look better than the prune ones so it's not really worth the time and effort to go out there and prune those things these right here would have to look considerably better than these for it to be worth the time going out there cutting all those side limbs off multiple times so no need to mess with them just let them grow so now let's talk about the three things that I think led to Our Success with the Brussels sprouts this year and we'll start off with varieties so we've actually got two varieties planted here now this didn't affect the results from our experiment I had a few seeds left over from a variety we grew last year called Gladius and that's what's planted here on this road closest to me probably those first six or seven plants now the ones we just compared for our experiment we took from down there it's all the same variety so no worries about different varieties affecting the results of our experiment the rest of these plants are a variety called Dagon d-a-g-a-n that we've never grown before and it seems to be a pretty dang good variety for us so both of the varieties we grew this year Gladius and Dagen are hybrid varieties now in past years I have grown some open pollinated varieties I grew one several years back called Catskill and it did really really poor for us now I've told you before on previous videos that with some vegetables there's not a whole lot of difference between the open pollinated and the hybrid is some cases open pollinated may be better than the hybrid version of some vegetables but when it comes to Brussels sprouts it seems to me that the hybrids significantly outperform the kind of older varieties out there so it may very well be worth that extra cost of the hybrid seed to get some really good production like you see here compared to buying cheaper seed and maybe not getting near as much now the other thing that probably helped us out a good bit this year was that Arctic blast now that Arctic blast was deadly on some of the stuff we had planted it didn't bother these brussels sprouts one bit and it's pretty well documented out there that they need a good shot of cold for some solid Sprout production now the Arctic blast completely destroyed our cauliflower that was in this plot here didn't get the first bit of cauliflower this winter but it seemed to have helped out our brussels sprouts and that's why it's always important to plant a diversity of stuff in your garden especially in the fall and winter garden so I'm usually going to have a warmer winter that may make some vegetables Thrive more than others some years you're going to have a real cold winter like we had this year and the others will Thrive then so choosing the right variety and having some cold weather helped us get to this point here but I think the most important factor that led to Our Success this year the best brussels sprouts we've ever grown has to do with how we fed the plants now I knew that brassicas are somewhat heavy feeders take broccoli for example got to really feed broccoli well before you start getting some head production otherwise you'll end up making small heads and eat big broccoli plants to make big broccoli heads cabbage is another heavy feeder got a really pump the nitrogen to Cabbage to get some nice big heads I knew we had to feed these some nitrogen I just didn't know how much so as opposed to just side dressing these Brussels sprout plants one time like we usually do with broccoli and cauliflower or maybe even two times like it would do with cabbage we gave these three side dressings of nitrogen with the naturesafe 1300 and our plants as you saw earlier look dark green and they're full of nice beautiful Sprouts now I don't have any really good numbers as far as developing a fertilization plan for brussels sprouts can't really tell you how many cups of nitrogen you need to use per row feet but I would say it's pretty hard to overdo it with these things now brussels sprouts are not what I would consider a real good vegetable for beginner gardeners to grow it's taken me quite a few years of hard work and frustration to get to this point right here but I would say if you're used to growing broccoli clean cabbage and having pretty good results with those think about how much nitrogen you give your cabbage and then up that even more for your brussels sprouts now the one thing I didn't mention when talking about those three keys to success this year would be planting time and that's because we planted these at the same time we plant brussels sprouts every single year so we didn't change anything as far as planting time this year but I do think planting time is very important so for these we started the seeds in our Greenhouse in early September of last year and then we transplanted them into this garden plot say mid-october and for most of the country I think that's what you want to do you want to plant them in the fall before it gets real cold give them time to establish and start growing and then grow them through the winter months the Arctic blast didn't even phase these I don't know how cold the temperatures they can take for the 17 degrees we had didn't bother them one bit so in most places you should be able to grow them throughout the winter you just gotta laying ahead because these things are in the ground 120 150 days got a plan ahead have those transplants ready to go in the ground in the fall so they can get established before it gets too cold so now we just need to pluck off these little Sprouts here and we'll have some good groceries to eat tonight another great thing about this year's Harvest is there's not a whole lot of runts along that stalk there usually every year you get some stalks that have at least a few ruts on them but pretty much all these Sprouts here look good and just as a side note when we used to sell our vegetables when we had kind of our weekly CSA vegetable program I used to sell these things on the stalk didn't feel like there was any need to pick them off for folks and a lot of people just like seeing where they come from a lot of people don't know how brussels sprouts grow and so it's just kind of a neat thing to sell them on the stalk like that and made it a lot easier for us we'd have to sit here and pick them all off everybody and as far as cooking these there's several ways we like to do it of course you can just toss them in some olive oil salt and pepper throw them in a skillet and just kind of saute them that way we also like put them in the air fryer these little ones like this really good in the air fryer toss them in some olive oil and they crisp up pretty quick like that now another way to cook them I learned this from a local Chef several years ago if you have some stackable cookie sheets or cookie pans with the kind of ridges around them what you do is you take one cookie sheet and just slather it down with some bacon grease and then just stack these brussels sprouts not on top of one another but side by side just as thick as you can get them on that pan and then take another pan and put on top of them and you can put some weight on top of them or the way we do it so we got this Stone pan that's pretty heavy that we put on top of the Brussels sprouts put them in the oven it'll kind of smash them down and Fry I'm in that bacon grease and you want to talk about some fine eating that's a great way to prepare them it's a little more of a mess a little more work than just do them in the airfryer which is pretty dang good now I'm pretty confident we got more brussels sprouts out there than we can eat in the next few weeks so if any of you out there have any good preservation methods for brussels sprouts I'd really like to hear about it now let me say this I don't care for frozen broccoli or frozen carrots we don't freeze our broccoli and carrots we just eat them while we have them because when we freeze them the texture just doesn't stay there they end up tasting kind of chewy soft I just don't like frozen broccoli or carrots so if you've got a way to freeze these and them still taste pretty good when you thaw them out and cook them again let me know in the comments below so I've almost got a bowl full here and I hope all this information was helpful today especially for those of you who have struggled growing brussels sprouts in the past I think if you just feed them more you'll have a lot better success like we did so I got all those picked off those six stalks we harvested and that's what we got there almost a big bowl full so if you're wondering how many plants you should grow hopefully that'll help you out a little bit that's probably a meal's Worth right there I can really mow through these things so if you want to have brussels sprouts on more than one meal you probably want to grow more than you know six or ten plants that's why we planted two rows of them that way we could have plenty and have something to share and as always you can find links to our affiliate Partners in the description below got some coupon codes for some of those companies so you can take advantage of those discounts don't forget to go check out our website lazydogfarm.com where we've got our fig trees for sale got some seeds available there got our garden block recipes all kind of good stuff over there if you did enjoy the video be sure to subscribe hit that notification button like and share and we'll see you next time right here at Lazy Dog Farm oh God will move by the beauty of your life

Channel: Lazy Dog Farm

Views: 50,954

Keywords: backyard gardening, organic gardening, sustainable living, vegetable gardening, vegetable garden, homestead, homesteading, homestead garden, organic food, small farm, sustainable agriculture, home garden, sustainable farming, sustainable food, organic garden, backyard garden, home gardening, garden advice, garden tips, garden techniques, gardening tips, garden seeds, garden varieties, gardening, garden, how to garden, grow your own food, kitchen garden, clean food

Id: A84TLH0IIUo

Length: 16min 13sec (973 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 23 2023