Why Grow Brassicas in Your Veg Patch: 5 Real Benefits

The courgettes gave out in September. By late October the raised beds look like something abandoned, all brown stems and empty cane frames — except for the far corner, where a row of Savoy cabbages stand.

Brassicas do this. When the rest of the veg patch has wound down, they are still going, heads tightening in the cold, kale darkening from the frost.

They treat brassicas as a bonus, planted if there is space, removed when things take a turn. The pest pressure puts people off, and the long lead times, and the sheer room the plants take.

The case for deciding to grow brassicas in your veg patch - someone has to cover October through to April, and not many crops will.

They crop when nothing else does

Brussels sprouts start coming in September and keep going through to Christmas, long after most other beds have been cleared and turned over. Spring cabbages sown in late summer will give you loose early greens in March and April, when the shops charge for anything fresh and your own garden offers almost nothing.

Kale has been growing on European soil for at least 3,000 years. Crops that fail repeatedly do not persist across three millennia of farming. Kale survives cold that would finish most vegetables, and it keeps producing through it.

The gap it fills is real. From October onwards, the typical veg patch is a stretch of bare earth and spent bean canes. Brassicas are one of the few things still edible, still worth the walk down the garden.

What they do to the soil

Brassica roots work the bed before you do. Radishes drive down through compacted layers; turnip bulbs push and heave the topsoil as they swell. Michigan State University Extension cites brassicas specifically as cover crops for their ability to break compaction and suppress weeds, two jobs that would otherwise cost you hours.

The nutrition case

The benefits of growing brassicas in the vegetable garden show up at the table as vitamins C and K, potassium, and soluble fibre.

Raw, or steamed for no more than five minutes, keeps the profile intact. A slaw made from red cabbage gives you more than a side dish braised for an hour ever would.

More than one crop from one plant

Cut a broccoli head and you haven't finished with the plant. Side shoots come through for weeks, each one a smaller but perfectly usable floret. You get four or five harvests from something you planted once.

Kale works the same way. Pull the outer leaves from the base and the plant keeps growing inward, producing through the coldest months without being lifted.

Brussels sprouts add another layer. 'Crispus' is ready from September and runs through to Christmas, but plant a later variety alongside it and you push the window well into the new year. If one fails to button up, the other covers it.

The variety is the point

No other family in the veg patch covers so much ground. Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale, kohlrabi, pak choi: between them, something is ready in every month of the growing year.

When you grow brassicas in the veg patch, planning around maturity times changes what you can do with the space. Napa cabbage is ready in 70 to 90 days. Other cabbage types can take up to 180. Plant both and you get a crop in late summer and another in winter from the same bed, without any gap in production.

The one thing that catches growers out

Pigeons will strip a young cabbage plant to a stalk before you've noticed. Cabbage white butterflies lay eggs on the undersides of leaves, and the caterpillars that follow can hollow out a head in days. Cabbage root fly works below soil level, unseen until the plant wilts and tips over.

Insect-proof mesh netting over bamboo canes stops all of them. It needs to go on before you transplant.

Slugs are a separate problem, and beer traps work. A shallow container sunk to rim level near your plants, filled with cheap lager, catches them overnight.

The mesh goes up first. The seedlings go in. Get that wrong and you'll spend the rest of the season looking at lace where your leaves should be.