[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
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