Broccoli

Sowing: Broccoli is a cool-season crop, most often established from purchased transplants or seed raised for transplanting, and grown where it gets at least four to six hours of direct sun in soil with a pH around 6.2 to 6.5, ideally amended with composted manure before planting. Because it needs cool weather to develop properly, gardeners in warm regions plant it in fall and winter rather than as the weather turns hot.

Watering: The crop benefits from a balanced 6-8-8 nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium fertilizer applied at planting and then regularly through the season, delivered as a liquid feed or a controlled-release solid. It needs one to two inches of water a week, with an occasional heavy soaking preferred to frequent light sprinklings, and a layer of mulch helps hold soil moisture and suppress weeds; young plants also benefit from protection when temperatures drop to 32°F or below.

Broccoli that bolts — its flower buds opening into bloom — turns bitter, and rising temperatures during the growing season are what push the crop toward this change, which is why timing plantings for cool weather matters.

Broccoli is typically ready for harvest 80 to 100 days after transplanting.

Culinary: Broccoli is grown for its immature flower buds, eaten as a vegetable, and the plant is noted for providing good amounts of riboflavin, calcium, iron, and vitamins A and C.

Broccoli descends from wild cabbage native to the Mediterranean, a plant originally cultivated only for its foliage. Selecting for larger leaves produced kale by around the fifth century BC, and further selection went on to yield cabbage and kohlrabi. Only within the last thousand years did growers begin selecting for immature flower buds instead, a shift that produced cauliflower by the fifteenth century and then broccoli in the sixteenth century, with broccoli's variety name italica marking its development in Italy.