A question for Brussel Sprout growers

david

Member
Location
County Down
Your certainly giving your sprouts plenty of room to grow on 32 x 18 inch spacing, 28 x 16 inch would be more typical in NI with sprouts planted on drills made up with fergy drill plough. Too wide may be worse than too close for sprouts, as you will end up with sprout plants resembling Christmas trees. You almost need a degree of inter-plant competition for sprouts, to get them to make height and space the buttons out a bit.

I would probably say to put all fert in at planting, I think that nitrogen leaching out is somewhat over played a bit - having all the nitrogen on at planting does make a difference in a dry year.

Will be interested to see if all these supermarkets have packs of veg for 19p selling on Christmas week again. De-valuing fresh produce :mad: then robbing folks on everything else in the shop.

Yes - plenty of cauli about, need a couple of nights hard frost to slow them up ;)
 
Yes I usually get good results.

But in the late season I do run into trouble too often with sprouts touching each other. Just trying too hard to have the best sprout stems in the area.

Will use all three rows next year but we have to stick with 64 inch wheel track on a raised bed, we grow lots of crops.
 

david

Member
Location
County Down
Do you grow a brussels sprout variety called Petrus ?

Very decent variety, which comes into its own around Christmas and will hold through Jan and Feb. Nice dark green buttons, good flavour and good disease resistance.
 
Do you grow a brussels sprout variety called Petrus ?

Very decent variety, which comes into its own around Christmas and will hold through Jan and Feb. Nice dark green buttons, good flavour and good disease resistance.

Yes but nothing special here, harvesting them today about 15% outgrades, slightly better than Fannus.

Dominator has been my worst. But Gigantus some of the best sprouts I've ever grown.

A year of extremes Abacus was poor but delighted with Crispus (no club root issue)
 

Chrismc530

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Armagh, Ireland
Never seen a worse year for sprout sales here . Very short plants and quality poor also. Pulling helemus at the minute, later Petrus not just as bad.Seems unless your selling to the supermarkets your safer planting another crop
 
Never seen a worse year for sprout sales here . Very short plants and quality poor also. Pulling helemus at the minute, later Petrus not just as bad.Seems unless your selling to the supermarkets your safer planting another crop

Odd demand is super here, just very hard to supply.

Not sure supermarkets that great. Would hate to think I'd a contract to supply this year. Large grower nearby spent a lot of money growing & harvesting a very poor crop.

Sorry you are having trouble Puresteal, are you like the rest of us short plants, yellow wings and the odd rotten sprouts, black spots, crop not as green as normal, poor shelf life etc.
 
Tesco no veg shortage

Everything 29p including 2 kilo of potatoes, kilo carrots, half kilo parsnips, 500g pack sprouts (although marked, so problem there) & large caulies.

500 x 29p equals £149/ton. So Tesco is paying for that promotion then think of packing costs.
I paid £5.40 for 10kg sacks of carrots so £2.90 off the Tesco shelf.

Back on topic no sprout sticks on offer, they usually do have them.

Cheap advertising for them really, just put a few pence on chocolates & wine and they are onto a winner.

They did this last year, but too busy to deliver to our local Tesco (large one) for three days, so we had a bumper Xmas in our farmshop last year because the shelves were bare at Tesco. They did eventually get a delivery 11.30 am Xmas eve shelves piled high with perisables when I was doing my Xmas shop at 4pm.
 
https://www.producegrower.com/article/bayer-introduces-serenade-optimum/

Not heard of this product before.

Seems to tick a lot of boxes.

Things got worse here, the deteriation in one week is something I've never seen before. But walking around the sheep today, never known such wonderful grazing at this time of the year, grass so deep green and lush. So no wonder sprouts are over mature.

Caulies are amazing this year, actually had my annual glut week (we always get a glut some part of the season) just before Xmas, so was able to move the glut at decent money. Thinking aloud Cornwall was always better at growing Caulie than sprouts, Barnsley this year has had a Cornish early winter period.

Will take on board David's comments & try different spacing next year, broader rande of varieties & tighten spray intervals. The serenade optimum if it gets an EMU for sprouts appears to be useful.

Before anyone comments, we are celibrating Xmas tomorrow, when the family are all together.
 

david

Member
Location
County Down
@Devil's advocate

You can buy the Bayer product in UK as Serenade ASO. It's quite widely used by strawberry growers for control of botrytis and white storage cabbages have been drenched with Serenade following the loss if Rovral, again to control botrytis while the cabbages are in cold stores. Serenade is not that cheap !

One attraction of Serenade is zero harvest interval, so you can treat and eat on the same day .

The USA label may make claims of controlling bacterial diseases that you won't see on the UK Serenade label, as you don't need to submit efficacy data in the USA for product approval, but you do in the UK. In the USA if something doesn't work, the manufacturer will get sued, so there may be some validity that it may control bacterial diseases.

Crops (sprouts and cabbages) are not holding well due to being damp and mild, we have snowdrops and daffodils flowering here.

Cold weather is forecast for January, but will do more harm than good, really needed cold Nov and Dec.
 
I saw my first snow drops, whilst delivering logs to a customer.

I don't remember an early winter period las mild as this one. Grassland so dry to walk on too, heavy land with massive cracking from the summer. Light to medium loams with veg pretty sticky but not the usual huge deep ruts full of water.
 
Cutting Clovis caulie today. Good crop but needed to go slow to make sure every snotty leaf was removed. Very glad it has stopped raining, dry air should slow down any spread of disease. Treated with Amistar Top 6th November. Winter caulie can be hard to predict heading date, never gone so late before.

Market a bit slow this week of course, punters buying booze now.

£1.65 a head in Tesco now, recovering some of that loss leader money, GOOD!
 

Stuart J

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
UK
How's everyones sprouts looking just now?
Away to start a spray programme, planning every 2 weeks? That sound right enough or too tight?
Signum every 3 weeks, with something like Amistar or a generic azoxy or prothi in between times?
Add CTL in each time?

Sorry, few questions there!
 

Stuart J

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
UK
Ok sprout growers.
Picked a stem for home consumption, bottom two sprouts had brown Mark's inside and out popped a small, 5mm long, white grub.
Cabbage root fly?? Anything I can do??
 

Bogweevil

Member
Ok sprout growers.
Picked a stem for home consumption, bottom two sprouts had brown Mark's inside and out popped a small, 5mm long, white grub.
Cabbage root fly?? Anything I can do??

Yes, CRF - they tend to go for lower buttons near soil level, seldom spoils all sprouts on stem. If you whack caterpillars with deltamethrin that will help prevent maggots. Organic growers can try applying nematodes a few weeks ago..

Too late now, maggots safe in buttons, oh Metasystox when we need you.
 
The same chemical used for module drenching Verimark is available by another name for foliar treatment, but too late now & you can't use verimark twice so you have to use tracer as the drench.

Never used less insecticide on my brassica but have spent most of summer under nets, to keep the bloody rabbits, pigeons & public off. A right mess with weeds though. Just never had any spare time this summer, everthing has been done at the wrong time.
 

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