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  • From: "GlenEcoFarm" <Glenecofarm AT planetcomm.net>
  • To: "Market Farming" <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Market-farming] White plastic mulch for fall cole crops
  • Date: Sun, 12 Jul 2009 22:24:20 -0400

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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