Whip tail, shade and cute veggies

Picked

• 2 cauliflowers
• side shoots of broccoli
• snow peas
• 1 cabbage
• long cayenne and small chillies
• half a basket of lemons

Planted

• 3 celery plants
• 4 broccoli plants
• 3 cauli plants
• 2 punnets violas
• 1 punnet of Italian parsley

Other

• weeded
• spread a big pile of compost around
• limed

Finally a sunny day!  We have had lots of rain in Sydney and it's been hard to get into the garden. Today I made up for it. There were a few patches in the garden that needed filling and, as I had been away for so long, I didn't have any hand raised seedlings to go in so I picked up a few seedlings from the local nursery.

I also did a lot of picking, the pick of lemons will turn into cordial later today.

But take a look at the picture at the beginning of this post,  is something wrong? Looks a bit weird right? Either the snow peas and some of the chillies are massive or  the brassicas are tiny. Well the chillies are massive -  they are my long cayenne which are still producing, and the broccoli heads are tiny, but they are the side shoots that come up after the main head has been removed.

But the other brassica are tiny.... but aren't they cute?

Cute they may be but the result of two different problems in the patch  this season.... too much shade for some of the veggies and not enough lime.

My patch isn't huge and the soil over a number of years has built up quite nicely  so in general I can get away with packing the bed pretty full, that is provided everything gets a little sun. But unfortunately most of my savoy cabbages didn't get enough and the plants are all pretty small.

This little fella above is of the smallest of the plants.  I figured it wasn't going to come to much so it got picked.

And what of the caulis? Too much shade too?  Well some of the plants got a little less light than I would have liked, but the main problem was a case of whip tail. Whip tail is a molybdenum deficiency that apparently is exacerbated by insufficient liming of the soil.  I read somewhere one day that Australian soils a pretty deficient in this micro-nutrient anyway, but not enough liming makes it harder for the plant to utilise what there is in the soil. As a result the plants don't grow strongly, they get a twist in their leaves and sometimes the leaves get thin and whip like (not my problem).  A bad case results in no heads at all.

I guess I am lucky I have these two little babies.There are a few  more plants in the garden but I think I will be lucky if I get anything more than heads this size from them.

But they might be cute steamed whole? They'd look cute on the plate?  I could of course just say that it was all deliberate and that I am cultivating cute baby veggies!

How are your brassicas?