Cauliflower

WORDS BY LYNDA HALLINAN

Cauliflower has a lot to thank the low-carb craze for. Before health-conscious foodies started blitzing these blonde-haired brassicas into pizza bases and ‘rice’ dishes, the best a cauliflower could hope for was to be boiled alive and blanketed in a spoonstandingly thick cheese sauce.

When I was growing up, cauliflower cheese was the entirety of my mother’s cauliflower cooking repertoire. I loathed it. I'd slyly secret it into my dressing gown pockets or down the side of the sofa cushions until I was caught in the act, bringing a premature end to TV dinners on the couch. For the rest of my childhood, I begrudgingly consumed cauliflower under parental supervision, though I got quite adept at slipping saucy morsels to our family cat, Biggles.

My taste buds must have matured – along with my taste for aged cheddar – because cauliflower cheese is now the number one culinary reason why I grow cauliflower. Also, I like a gardening challenge almost as much as I like comfort food, and cauliflowers can be as temperamental as Brussels sprouts.

Plant cauliflowers in full sun in compost-rich soil, spacing the seedlings 50cm apart, and feed regularly with liquid fertiliser. In sheltered suburban gardens with raised beds, you've probably still got time to sow a winter crop from seed, but in colder areas, I'd recommend transplanting punnets of store-bought seedlings instead, as seed sown now might not produce a crop until late spring, when you've all but given up hope.

Like all brassicas, cauliflowers grow best in the shoulder seasons of autumn and spring. In high summer they're eaten alive by white cabbage butterfly caterpillars, while over winter, the plants tend to sit and sulk in a holding pattern, producing neither leaf nor head as they await warmer soil temperatures.

Take it from me, you can't rush a cauliflower. It'll form a head when it's ready, and not a day before. Unfortunately, you also can't slow the harvest, although a partial decapitation can buy some time if too many heads mature at once. Use a sharp knife to cut halfway through the stem about 5cm below the head to slow the sap flow and hold the curds tight for a few extra days. Folding the outer leaves over the head (a friend of mine employs a scrunchy hair tie to hold the leaves in place) also protects maturing heads from weather damage.

Fun fact: Although the name ‘cauliflower’ derives from the Italian cavolfiore, meaning ‘cabbage flower’, those pearly white curds are actually a failed attempt at flowering. Unlike broccoli florets, which are made up of bunches of green flower buds, cauliflower heads are clusters of mutated inflorescence meristems. Rather than forming normal flowers on the tips of these stems, the cells get distracted at a molecular level and keep dividing in fractal fashion to create those distinctive blobby heads instead.

Cauliflower Choices

• Depending on the variety, cauliflowers take 12–16 weeks from seed to harvest, with modern hybrids generally getting on with things faster than heirloom types. The quickest to mature is ‘Phenomenal Early’.

• For classic white cauliflowers, sow the hybrids ‘Snowbowl’ and ‘All Year Round’ (Yates Seeds), or transplant seedlings of ‘White Cloud’ or compact ‘Mini White’ (Zealandia punnets).

• For colourful cauliflowers, sow heirloom ‘Green Macerata’ and ‘Violet Sicilian’ (Kings Seeds), or transplant ‘Purple Rain’ or the unusual orange form ‘Cheddar’ (Zealandia punnets).

Lynda Hallinan

Waikato born-and-raised gardening journalist Lynda Hallinan lives a mostly self-sufficient life at Foggydale Farm in the Hunua Ranges, where she grows enough food to satisfy her family, free-range chooks, kunekune pig and thieving pukekos. She has an expansive organic vegetable garden and orchards and is a mad-