Balcony Garden: (un)Harvest Monday #41

In amongst all the Cos Lettuce my colleague gave me a few months ago was a stray broccoli seedling.  I planted it in with the Cos with the view that I'd have to harvest ALL my cos as soon as it was ripe for the picking. Broccoli takes up A LOT of room so it was asta la vista lettuce!

I knew I was only going to get one head of broccoli from the plant and I had about 10 different things I thought of cooking with it. I was going to have to be discerning with my choice of recipe...

It was long before I started to notice to tiny little chomp marks on the leaves of my broccoli.  Not to worry, I just squished the caterpillars and the broccoli kept on growing. Bigger and bigger.

And before long the plant was pretty much one great big giant hole!

I always find it amazing the way caterpillars change colours depending on what they eat. These guys were a deep, dark green as opposite to the bright green caterpillars that like to eat my mint. I have no idea if they are the same sort of caterpillars or if they are different for each plant...but the colours are amazing!

Despite the holes the broccoli started to make broccoli.

And then within nanoseconds the bunch broccoli (is it called "a bunch"?) turned into one great big flower...I've heard you can eat the flowers but I wasn't really into it. As I contemplated this tragedy, and maybe eating broccoli flowers,  the whole lot bolted a became a tall, skinny mess of flowers and holey leaves. Good news is though that I had BEES visiting my balcony in droves for the first time ever!

So there you have it. The story of the broccoli that never was.

You can view more Harvest Monday posts on Daphne's Dandelions blog.