How to Grow Cauliflower

Cauliflower has a reputation for being hard to grow. Though it's a cool-season vegetable, it can't tolerate weather that's too hot or too cold, and it needs special treatment, called blanching, to retain its white color. Fortunately, new varieties are more tolerant than their forebears.

Difficulty:

Moderately challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Bypass Pruners
• Cauliflower Seeds
• Compost Makers
• Fertilizers
• Garden Spades
• Garden Trowels
• Mulch
• Heavy Twine

1. Choose a site that gets full sun. The soil should have a pH of 6.0 to 7.0 and must be well-drained, evenly moist and amended with plenty of organic matter.

2. Start early varieties indoors about a month before the last expected frost. Move the plants to the garden when they're about 6 inches tall, all danger of frost has passed, and temperatures of both air and soil have warmed to about 50 degrees F. Set the plants in their holes, cover them just short of the bottom leaves, and build a little saucer of soil around each plant to help hold moisture.

3. Sow seeds directly in the ground for a fall harvest. Place them in clusters of four seeds each, with the clusters 2 feet apart. When the first true leaves appear, remove all but the sturdiest seedling from each group.

4. Keep cauliflower plants evenly moist; especially when they're small, they need about 1 inch of water a week, whether from rain or the garden hose.

5. Start the blanching process when the flower head (also called a curd or button) is about the size of an egg. Make sure neither it nor the foliage is wet; otherwise the plant may rot. Loop heavy twine around the leaves, gently lift them up and tie them together. The aim is to keep light and moisture out, but to let air in and also leave room for the flower to grow inside its shelter.

6. Harvest cauliflower heads when they're full but before the sections begin to loosen. The timing depends on the variety, so start checking plants daily when the heads reach 3 to 4 inches across.

Tips & Warnings

• You might want to try planting Orange Bouquet, which is a pale orange variety that matures in 60 days, needs no blanching and packs a big load of vitamin A.

• Cauliflower can fall victim to clubroot, a fungus that can invade your garden on infected plants. You can avoid the disease by growing your own seedlings rather than buying them, by growing cauliflower and other Brassica crops in a different spot each year, and by choosing disease-resistant cultivars. (They're marked as such in seed catalogs.)