Growing cabbage family vegetables where winters are warm can be challenging, but if your cauliflowers fizzle and brussels sprouts are out of the question, growing kohlrabi might be the go.
Growing kohlrabi
In our subtropical plot we actually have a fair selection of cabbage – type vegetables (Brassicas) that grow well. All the ‘asian’ types like bok choi, gai lan, and wom bok (napa cabbage) are quick, easy and reliable here, but it’s nice to have the stemmy types like broccoli and cauliflower too, and they can be tricky. My first go at cauliflower this year was a fizzer. It flowered without cauli-ing. Had I known I would have picked all the little florets early. Another cultivar might work, but I suspect it’s just not cold enough here for cauliflower, and only just cold enough for broccoli, which gave a decent crop of small heads.
But kohlrabi has stepped in as the stemmy brassica star. Grown through Winter here, it has done well without attention, and the flavour is great. It is so sweet and tender that it hasn’t made it to a gratin or stir fry yet, but stayed as a salad vegetable. It’s good just julienned and mixed with mayonnaise, but a more complicated slaw would be great I think.
The name means roughly ‘cabbage turnip’ but the vegetable part is the enlarged stem tip rather than the root, and it sits well above the ground, looking like a stranded radish. The unnamed cultivar I have has attractive bluish to purple leaves, and likewise the skin of the stem is an attractive purple. The peeled vegetable is white.
It grows easily from seed (I sowed mine in a tray and transplanted the seedlings) in fertile, pH neutral, well drained soil. Here it doesn’t cope well with warmer weather, so it’s definitely a crop to sow in Autumn and enjoy in late Winter.