[Market-farming] White plastic mulch for fall cole crops

GlenEcoFarm Glenecofarm at planetcomm.net
Sun Jul 12 22:24:20 EDT 2009


Last year for the first time I transplanted brocolli and cauliflower onto 
white plastic mulch thinking that the white plastic would not heat up as 
much and be gentler on the young plants after they were put out in the 
ground in late July-early August, a time of year when it is usually hot and 
dry in our part of the country.  Other than being a little overgrown and 
rootbound when coming out of the greenhouse, the plants were healthy and 
started off reasonably well on the end of the patch opposite to where a 
groundhog gave us a little trouble soon after the plants were set out.  Most 
of the planting grew well and the plants sized up good and seemed to be 
thriving throughout the late summer and fall despite the dry weather and my 
wife's accusations that I was not running the drip irrigation enough on 
them.

But the cauliflower would not head up!   The year before I was harvesting by 
mid October heads of cauliflower that wouldn't fit inside of a five gallon 
bucket!  Some of them sold for as much as $12.00/head!  And that was after 
fighting a gallant battle with cabbage worms and harliquin bugs when the 
planting was small.  Last year the crop was relatively pestilence free and 
through September gave every appearance that there was going to be another 
wonderful crop.  October came and went without my harvesting more than a 
modest amount of brocolli and only a few small heads of cauliflower.  By 
late October we got some frosts hard enough to stop the further growth of 
the cauliflower.  Then followed some killing frosts in early November that 
pretty well finished off the whole crop and I basically gave up on getting a 
harvest.  Two weeks later I decided to check out the now sad looking site 
and found a number of baseball-softball sized heads of cauliflower with 
varying degrees of freeze damage but many with damage minor enough that they 
were sellable.  It was not a total loss but it sure wasn't profitable!

I'm wondering if the white reflective plastic might have retarded the 
flowering of the otherwise healthy crop that I thought I had gotten 
transplanted soon enough.  I still have a partial roll of the white plastic 
and would like to use it again.  My starts have been growing like 
gangbusters in the greenhouse for the past few weeks and are plenty big 
enough to go into the ground now.  It's a good two weeks earlier than I had 
planned on setting them out.  What do some of the rest of you think?  Is 
using white plastic mulch for fall brassicas a good or bad idea?  I would 
sure hate to screw up again.

Marlin Burkholder
Virginia 



More information about the Market-farming mailing list