Growing Swede in Your Spanish Garden

General Items
Crop Rotations
Crop Succession

Swede - Colinabo

Some people like swede, some don't. They are easy to grow and appear fine to leave in the ground until you need them through the winter, which I always feel is a bonus. They can give flavour to a vegetable casserole, mixed and mashed with potato for extra flavour, or on their own mashed with butter.

Mature Swede

Sow the seeds thinly but allowing for them to be thinned after germination, at a depth of about 1cm. As with all seeds they need to be kept moist to germinate but another good point with swede is that they germinate quickly - possibly within 3 days.
After they have germinated, they should be thinned before they start competing with each other for light and water. It is best to thin in two stages, initially to a spacing of 3-4 cm and later to the final spacing of 15 - 20 cm, attempting to leave the better plants and removing the weaker ones. Sadly the stronger ones are often in the right place of course.

"Half Thinned" young swede

Being in the brassica (cabbage) family, they may suffer from caterpillars. If necessary you can spray with an appropriate spray, or remove the pests by hand. If you are growing plenty of swede you may feel you can accept a reduced yield due to the caterpillars and ignore though you may surprised how damage they can do.

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