The Joy of...............Cauliflower.

After the controversial, and may I say ground breaking decision to plant my Cauliflowers in a circle, (the circle signifying the head of the flower). I was not surprised that they were failing.

Apart from the planting I felt that I had done everything correctly.  I planted the plugs in moist soil and watered them well in, I had netted them straight away, to stop the greedy pigeons, and as we get very little rain in East Anglia I made sure they were never dry.

Despite all this devotion all I seemed to have grown was a mass of green leaves, I was actually wondering if you can cook them.

So I decided to remove the netting.  As I did this I pulled away some of the leaves, I was surprised to see the most perfect whitest Cauliflower head I have ever seen, I moved to the next plant and I actually squealed, another one just the same. It's hard to convey the absolute delight that I had in this discovery, most people on the allotment had told me they could be tricky so I think I had anticipated failure.

Buoyed by my success and dreaming of cheese sauce, I went to harvest the cauliflower.  It was at this point that I realised that I didn't know how to harvest a cauliflower. Do I pull up the whole plant, or do I just remove the flower? I walked around the allotments there was not a soul about, so I decided to ask on Twitter and sat all forlorn waiting for a response. @AllotmentMate, who Is a sort of allotment Superhero (not sure if he has a cape) came to my rescue, he very promptly tweeted Cut just below the Cauli taking a few leaves with it.

  

I did feel a bit of a fool, but it's always better to ask when you don't know, so thank you very much Ian.

I had also left the shed keys at home so was unable to get to the right tools for the job,  fortunately I had I pair of scissors and a nail file in my handbag so the beheaded was an old fashioned execution rather than the guillotine.

Everything we ate that night was  produced within a mile of our house, local Lamb, potatoes and Cauliflower cheese, very satisfying.