Brussels Sprouts Experiment

8 years ago

Does anyone have any interest in growing things from the grocery store??

I have successfully grown celery and onions by planting the cut-off root-ends of grocery-store purchases and also some of the onions I've grown in the previous seasons' garden. Some people say they have been able to start grapevines from the little woody cluster of stems that grapes are on, at the grocery store, but I have not had any luck with that. Also I think it's pointless to grow a carrot fern unless you have a kid that wants to do it for fun. To my knowledge, you can't get another carrot, but I suppose it's possible to get carrot seed. Not sure.

So this year, I'm experimenting with brussels sprouts and dates. I'll put information about the experiment with the dates in another post.

I grew Roodnerf, an old, open-pollinated variety of brussels sprouts, from seed last spring. The plants grew tall and survived through a hot and dry Oklahoma summer. They didn't really make anything beyond tiny buttons till fall, and at that point I did pick a good amount after they'd had their "sweetening-up frost treatment". And they were good, braised in a little butter in a skillet with a lid on to keep in the steam, but they were tedious to prepare as the outer leaves were damaged by summer's garden insects and had to be discarded.

I noticed there were quite a few at ground level of the stalk that were starting to grow out horizontally and so I cut off one that had gotten pretty good size and put the stalk it had made in a glass of water.

This is what it looks like now.

Some of the sprouts that we didn't eat, I placed in a cake-pan full of potting soil. They did not have stalks long enough to stand in water. That was about a month ago.

Here's what they look like now. I think they have made roots but I haven't dug into them to find out. I imagine, without roots, they'd be brown by now.

Plants in the cabbage family can take a fair amount of chill and I have in mind to plant these in the ground in early March.

I also tried making a row of them in the garden, each one protected by a glass quart canning jar and some wood-chip mulch.

This is how they looked yesterday, and we have had some bitterly cold weather for Oklahoma.

My original plants, I just mulched and left standing in the garden. They look like hell, but are still alive.

Carole, in Joplin, said she thought she'd buy some brussels sprouts at the store and see if she can root some as an experiment. I advised her to buy the ones that are sold still on the stalk if she can find them. Of course it's best to buy organic if you can get them, but if you can't, I think they'll still root.

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Comments (3)

jacoblockcuff (z5b/6a CNTRL Missouri
8 years ago
Wow I never knew you could do that. I'm hoping to give them a go this summer from seed (already bought), so I may have to give that a go this autumn. Maybe I could get some very early spring sprouts if I put them out in the garden this autumn. I would imagine this would be especially helpful for hybrid brussels where you can't save seed with the reassurance of it being true to type...

When do you start your seed? Our garden gets fairly shaded out by around early-mid Oct., which is usually about the time of our first frost (as with most of the Ozarks), so I figured mid May for a summer solstice planting? I've got some autumn cabbages that I am experimenting with this year, that have upwards around a 100 dtm from transplanting, so I'll be putting them out about the summer solstice as well. I'll be interested to see how they take the heat. They would head in Sept. and Oct. cool weather so I'd imagine they'd take to it well. What do you think?
User
Original Author
8 years ago
I just can't seem to get much of anything started by direct seeding into the garden in summer, for a fall garden. It's too hot and dry here, then. I'd just start them in the cool of spring and let them stand through the summer if you will. If I want a spring crop, I start my seeds in December or January, grow them under lights until March, and then set them out during a "warm spell". They can take more frost that you would think, but they'll tolerate mulching if you want to do that.
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Original Author
8 years ago
Well, this is about a month later and I thought I'd update you on the Brussels Sprouts Experiment.

This is how things look now:

These will most likely just flower and go to seed. Which is alright because it's an old Open Polinator named "Roodnerf", and I want seed. There is actually a variety of cabbage called "Walking Stick" that people make walking sticks out of, by drying the stalks out and then putting something on them like shellac or polyethelene for preservation. If you Google for "walking stick cabbage images", you'll see what I'm talking about. And I suppose I could turn these righteous stalks into walking sticks if I wanted to. I don't think they'll be making any more brussels sprouts unless they send a new plant up from the root, and I have a couple plants that had a brussels sprout formed at the bottom of the stalk that has taken root and will probably make a new plant. But I think we are nearing the end of life for these plants.

I had 14 little brussels sprouts that had made a bit of a stalk of their own, and they were the ones I broke off the main stalk and stuck them in the ground with a glass jar over. 4 have not survived. They have all "hardened off" with the jar removed and made it through their first night out from under, which included a bit of a rain, just fine. I will fill in the row with the ones that I put in a glass jar and kept inside. They made very good roots that way, as you can see in the picture I posted in January.

The sprouts that I put in a cake pan did very poorly. Might have been because they didn't have very long stems to start with. Might more likely be that I had put the pan outside in the sun whenever there was a nice day. When I saw some of the little heads turning yellow, I went in with my favorite surgical instrument (a teaspoon), and found the pan infested with The Dreaded Roly-Poly. So I pulled out the ones that were still in decent shape, rinsed the dirt out of their roots and put them in glasses of water. I only had a few that lived.

So I won't be hurting for brussels sprouts to start the garden with.

Here are my Golden Acre cabbage plants, started from seed. I think I will be getting them into the ground very soon.

Oh, and here are my tomato plants that I started from the side-branches that I removed when I transplanted the seedlings into a 32-oz soft-drink cup. I had poor results, only one Farmstand and two Independence Day have survived. Probably would've had better luck if the side-branches had been more mature.

Today's going to be a nice day, though muddy. Once again, I was surprised I remembered what that brown stuff IS that sticks to the shoes.