Rob plants cabbage and cauliflower, Megan cooks with kumara (sweet potato)
Before we plant our cabbages and cauliflowers we work compost and chicken manure into the soil to replenish nutrients, raise the bed and improve soil structure. We’ll also add a dressing of lime, as brassicas like an alkaline soil, and a dressing of rock dust to make sure our vegetables are nutrient-dense.
Dig holes for your plants 40-50 cms apart, then add neem granules or powder into each hole. That’s to help the plants ward off infestation by the white butterfly which is still flying.
We didn’t put neem granules in with the kale and broccoli we planted a few weeks back and the caterpillars are munching through them. So today we’ll give them a spray of Btk or Bacillus thuringiensis kurstaki (called something like Organic Caterpillar Control in retail outlets) which is a naturally occurring soil bacterium. When ingested by the larvae or caterpillars it produces a toxin that’s lethal. In the acid guts of other insects or animals it’s destroyed and is therefore totally harmless to them. Btk also has no withholding period on crops.
