Purple is the New White

I am so excited, I just had to share this photo with you!!!

It's the first ever decent cauliflower I remember harvesting from the Big Garden.

Whoop, whoop!

Okay, so it doesn't look exactly like your typical cauli, but I think the colour is rather gorgeous, don't you?  It's a purple variety I happened to get a punnet of that was on special.

We've never managed to grow decent heads on our cauliflowers before.  They'd always have these pathetically tiny heads with funny loose, skinny florets.  Very disappointing.  We stopped trying.  "At least broccoli heads in Tauranga," we thought.  But then I talked to a local nursery man who said to try boron.  Apparently boron deficiency locally can cause brassicas not to head properly.  I duly applied Ocean Solid across the whole garden, and Rok Solid in each planting hole, on the recommendation of the man who designed both (left a message asking if they had boron in them and he personally called and explained that they both do, how best to use them, and what to do if we find it's still not enough boron - buy their specialised boron only fertiliser).

So you can see why I'm so excited to have picked not one, but two cauliflower heads.  The other, slightly smaller on, is waiting in my parent's fridge for them.  I'd also read recently that cauli heads don't tend to get bigger.  We wait and hope, but then they just go to seed.  So I've resolved to stop being greedy.  It's a cauli.  It doesn't have to be huge.  We are gonna eat them whatever their size.  Better that than leaving it too long and missing out!  I'm hoping that the cauli success means there's enough boron in the soil now.  It could just be that this colour does better, of course.  But there's some white ones in the garden still, looking like they are just starting to set heads.  So time will tell.  In the meantime, we're having purple cauliflower in our salads for the next few days.

Yum.

Amy