Be aware of cauliflower's special requirements

Cauliflower is very sensitive to a boron deficiency, much more so than other cruciferous crops, writes Bill Kerr

- Bill Kerr

Much breeding work has been done on cauliflower in the past few decades. I was a salesman for a large seed company and introduced the first hybrid variety to vegetable farmers. It was an immediate success as it produced a uniform crop much earlier than the open-pollinated varieties used at that time.

Most of these old varieties were sensitive to day length and cold requirements. Some of these would have to be in the lands for many months and many would have huge curds weighing several kilograms.

Large farmers would select the best plants in a land to collect seed for subsequent plantings and there were a number of such varieties that were named by how many months they would take from transplant to maturity.

When hybrids started to become available, all these varieties would start to disappear, which was a great pity as some had some very good qualities and could have been used by international breeding companies to cross with their inbred lines.