 I'm going to wish all my viewers and all my subscribers around the world a very happy holidays here for 2015. So it is approximately 10 o'clock in the morning here in Houston, Texas. It's going to be 65 degrees today. So if you're a golfer, perfect golf weather or if you're an outside enthusiast, just great to be outside. So this episode today is going to be about broccoli. And broccoli is probably my first or second favorite vegetable out there. From a nutrient standpoint, it's low due with vitamins, antioxidants and all those great things. And broccoli is one of those rare crops that you can grow that you can harvest everything. So if you're a juicer, you can use the leaves for your shakes. And of course, if you like salads and other type of things where you can just eat broccoli fresh off the plant. So let me tell you a little bit about the broccoli plant. And I'm going to show you how I'm growing my broccoli, the success I'm having and the success you can have at home growing broccoli too. And at the end, I'm going to show you a very special thing. I've never grown broccoli hydroponically. So you actually can do that and I'll show you what I'm doing with one of my broccoli plants hydroponically. So to start with, the broccoli plant is part of the Cole crop family, COLE. And that family consists of cabbage, colabby, Brussels sprouts, kale and other cool weather type of crops that all of us enjoy around the year. Now, the great thing about broccoli is it cool weather crop. So it can pretty much grow as long as the soil is about 35, 40 degrees. But it can't really be over 80 degrees, 75, 80 degrees consistently. So you can get typically depending on where you live, two crops a year, a spring crop and a fall crop. So it's great. So broccoli does take 90 to 110 days to grow from seed. So you've got to be patient growing this, but I'll show you what my crops look like. And they're probably around day 80, but the heads of the broccoli are doing very well. So as far as being successful in growing broccoli, they do need about six hours, the plants need six hours of sun, six to seven hours of sunny day, okay? And again, you don't want it to be hot. If it's 80 degrees in sunny, the plants are going to, you'll see the leaves start to wilt and all that. In addition, it's very important when you grow broccoli that they have consistent watering. They need about an inch to two inches of water a week depending on where you live. If they dry out, it will cause problems in the broccoli head. And it may be inconsistent with smaller heads or browning heads and so forth. So I would definitely recommend steady watering. In addition, broccoli is one of those vegetable plants that requires nitrogen-rich soil. I apologize, my dog next door decides to bark right now, but they want nitrogen-rich soil. So what I would recommend you do is to get a good organic mulch, put it around the plant, and I think your broccoli plant will do just fine. Just a little bit of phosphorus will do well too. As far as pH goes, I would recommend a pH between six and seven, consistently in your soil, and you'll do well. If you don't know if your soil is six to seven, have it tested, okay? So I would lastly say that from a harvesting perspective, there's not many pests that bother the broccoli plant. The two major ones, I should say three major ones are cabbage lupers, cabbage worms, and aphids if you have aphids. So other than that, it's a pretty steady plant that's consistent if you grow it healthy. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to show you how my broccoli plants are growing. This is my fall crop. Now in Houston, Texas, we can actually have a crop that goes into the winter season because we don't have as harsh winters as other places in the world. So let me get behind the camera and show you how my broccoli plants, my soil grown ones are doing, and then I'll show you how my hydroponic ones are doing. Stay tuned. So here's the first of my soil planted broccoli plants, there's two of them. I had some extra space back here in my garden I planted two. Ideally, they should be probably a little bit about 24 inches apart for whatever reason. They didn't get that, they're probably about 18 inches apart, but that's okay. Let me show you the plant here, and you'll see it's doing pretty well. Now I picked a yellow leaf off. We've had 23 inches of rain here in Houston, Texas in the past month, and that type of rainfall is going to create problems for any type of plant, especially the tomatoes and the broccoli is no different. Here's the head, this is about 75 to 80 days old. You see the head's doing fairly well, really nice and green. Now from a broccoli perspective, this head's going to get bigger, so you can see it, let's put my hand in a comparison, so you'll see the size of it. It's going to get probably from a diameter perspective another three, four inches, slightly larger. Now don't be discouraged, some heads get larger than others, but it depends on a lot of things, soil, weather, rain, consistent water, and all those type of things. This is the head, I think it's going to get a little larger. You want to cut your heads and the broccoli heads here about four inches below the flower. This is the flower in the head part. You want to cut it about four to five inches below on the stem. You want to do it when all of these, this is the flowering part, the head of the broccoli is the very tight green heads. That's when it tastes the best. Once you see some inconsistencies in the broccoli head where parts of it grow higher than the others, or once you'd see it start turning yellow and start flowering, you want to get it off because some people don't like the taste of broccoli once it gets to a flowering stage. It tastes, some may call it a little bit bitter. You want to do it when it's tight like this, and this one will get a little bit bitter, but again every head will be different. Now, the broccoli plant, it's interesting that the leaves are awesome, the tritian. A lot of people will take the leaves and they will juice with them or slice them up and put them into their smoothie or breakfast drink, whatever it may be. But again, remember it's part of the kale, the chorabi family. All of these leaves are full of nutrients for your body. That's certainly one of the heads. What the interesting characteristics, and we'll take a look at one over here before I get to that. Now this head is not as big. And whatever reason it hasn't done much, it's actually tiny. So one of the interesting characteristics of this plant is that when you cut the head main head off, you will get broccoli shoots and other parts of the plant. So as many as 8 to 10, some of them actually may be as big as the original head. So don't be discouraged if the head is instead of being that size, it's that size. You may cut the initial head out and it will happen. So see additional heads form on the sides of the plant, just like you would see in a Brussels Broughts plant. So again, they could be 8 to 10 different heads that grow in the plant. So let me show you here's another one over here. This actually one got to be a pretty decent size head. You see again, there's again, we've had rain, so there's some water beaded up on top. But that nice tight head is what you want. This will get a little bit bigger. You actually see at the bottom, you actually see there's another broccoli head shooting off of that. But you will get additional, but this one's actually doing pretty well, other than the water on it, doing fairly well. So let me show you a few others that I have in my garden. Alright, so here are three broccoli plants. Again, I made a mistake, probably planted them 12 to 18 inches. They should be about 24 inches apart, but nevertheless, let's look into it. So here's a good example of the variety of the different size heads. So you look at these are all planted at the same time. So look at the size of that head compared to that tiny one, and that's small one. So they all grow differently, but you'll see that this one actually looks really good. Take a look at that. That's what a broccoli head should look like. It'll get a little bit bigger, but again, once you cut the main head off, don't cut it to go about four to five inches below the head. And cut and stem that. Once you cut that, it's going to send off shoots of different broccoli heads out. And those broccoli, some people like it better or just as tasty as the broccoli, that's at the top of the plant. So again, a smaller one and another one as well. So some of these leaves are a little crummy again. We've had a ton of rain. Just take them from away, give them your chickens, whatever you do. But the leaves that look like this, they're really green and on top, you can put those in your smoothies and so forth. So there's not much I can do to control the skies here in Houston, Texas, but it is what it is. But these three broccoli are doing well. Let me show you what my hydroponic broccoli looks like. That looks exceptionally well as well. So interestingly enough, my largest head of broccoli planted at the same time came from my hydroponic broccoli. So let's take a look at this. This is the hydroponic broccoli head. You'll see, doing very well looks really good. Pretty soon to be harvested. So again, the leaves, they don't go leaves itself on the hydroponic don't look as great as the soil planted broccoli, but nevertheless, okay. You'll see here the problem with the broccoli plant, is that head gets pretty heavy, my broccoli is leaning. So I probably need to get some type of steak. But here's a thing, so if you take a look at this point, you'll see, I hope you can see it because probably in the shadows will make it look cool. So you'll see here, there's actually shoots that are coming off the broccoli plant already below the main flower. So there's already eight to ten that are developing and they're just as tasty. So this is a Dutch broccoli system that's grown this hydroponic broccoli in. And over here you may, these look, again, from the same family of plants as this. So these may look like the same plants as this, but if not, so the same coal, the family of plants is the cauliflower. So these are hydroponic cauliflower that are growing. Again, you've got some newbie one here because of all the dang rain we've had, but these are the heads that got stored. Actually, one of the heads has stored it on one of my cauliflower's hydroponically and this is it right here. So as you'll know, the leaves wrap around it, but that's a hydroponically grown cauliflower. So you can see it's in a simple Dutch bucket system with a reservoir down there. But again, you can grow broccoli hydroponically if that's something you want to do. So that's an example of my hydroponically comparing to the soil broccoli. So that's all I have for you. Thanks for watching this episode of the Executive Gardening Channel. Please give me a thumbs up if you liked the video. We're sending to a friend that may be interested in getting into my and our gardening community here on the YouTube Garden Community. Again, I want to wish everybody around the world a very happy holidays. Hope everybody has a great holiday with the family. And if I don't talk to you for the new year, have a great new year as well. Take care. Bye.