Choosing & Planting Broccoli

Series Summary

Gardening can be a fun and aesthetically pleasing way to help integrate your home with its surrounding environment. Using native and exotic plants, you can create a landscape that compliments your backyard and adds a sense of new life and freshness to your everyday routine. And no matter what climate you may live in, garden greenery is good for the environment, gets you outside and moving about, and teaches you just a little bit about life. So everyone get out your green thumbs. In this free beginner gardening video series, get tips, advice, ideas and help for easy planting and fertilizing of your background garden. Learn how to choose the best vegetable and fruit plants for your garden, how to put the right plant in the right spot, how deep to dig the hole and bury the roots, how to water properly, using a stake for plant stem support, what garden tools and equipment to use, and more. Our expert horticulturalist will give you a general course in creating the right environment for your new plants to flourish. Take notes, and then create the garden of your dreams.

Video Transcript

"Today we're going to talk about how to pick out a fresh broccoli plant for your vegetable garden. A couple of things you want to look for, you want to make sure there's no black spots, or any kind of, you know bad looking leaves like these yellow ones. You kind of want to stay away from them, that's not too bad but you want to make sure that, you know, all of them aren't turning yellow or browning out in there. You want to get one with all four plants in them. A lot of the times you can find a couple that, well this one is missing one, you don't want to get that one. You just want to find one that looks nice and green like that, nice lighter green broccoli color. You need to, you need to plant these in full sun and make sure they're getting at least a half day sun. If it says full sun you need at least a half days sun. Now when planting any kind of broccoli plant you want to make sure that you have about fifty to eighty days for them to mature. I mean you want to get them started early so that you're not going to be trying to harvest them when it's starting to get cold out. Now is a good time to plant them in the early spring. You can use any kind of basic fertilizer. There are specific fertilizers for vegetable plants, but any kind of basic Miracle-Gro is going to definitely help you out. Miracle-Gro says, you know, your plants will get twice as big. And it's pretty true, if you don't fertilize them they're not going to get as big and as nice as if you were to use a normal Miracle-Gro fertilizer or special vegetable fertilizer. Whichever one you use is just fine. But you just want to make sure you're not missing any little plants in the little four-packs and no yellow spots or anything on them. That's a good broccoli plant right there. And you know, you just want to make sure you have a good soil, you're not putting them in any kind of clay or anything. You want to have a nice good potting mix or garden soil when you plant them."