How to influence vegetable brassica quality
Good nutrition is an essential pre-requisite for a high quality brassica crop and influences all aspects of quality: appearance, size, weight, shelf life and importantly taste and nutritional content.
By getting crop nutrition right, the grower brings forward harvest and consistently improves head, curd and leaf quality. This can have a significant, positive effect on marketable yield, produce grade, price and ultimately profitability.
Through crop nutrition practices the farmer is able to influence the external appearance of the brassica, including compactness, vegetable brassica size, weight, and colour.
It is also important to increase brassica shelf life, by improving storage quality. This can be achieved by insuring a high dry matter content and less moisture loss.
The sugar content in brassicas defines the taste, while the promoting health compounds depends on the levels of calcium, Vitamin C and glucosinolates.
Deficiencies should always be checked by using leaf tissue analyses. While the brassica grower can adapt nutritional programmes to modify dry matter, sugars and glucosinolates within the harvested produce, these are more strongly influenced by other management choices – particularly cultivar selection. After harvesting, controlled temperature storage is essential to maintain good quality brassica produce.
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It is important to produce a complete crop canopy as soon as possible after planting and then to maintain productive leaf areas for a long period, in order to maximize growth.
How to improve storage quality and shelf life of brassicas
Crop nutrition influences characteristics such as dry matter, cell wall strength and moisture control which all affect storage quality and shelf life of all brassica vegetables.
How to improve brassica nutritional health benefits
Brassica vegetables all contain various health promoting compounds including vitamin C and glucosinolates. A good balanced crop nutrition programme is needed to achieve good levels of these compounds.
How to improve vegetable brassica appearance
Through its influence on growth and development, crop nutrition influences all aspects of vegetable brassica appearance including size, weight, compactness and colour.
