'Sidekick' Piracicaba Mini Broccoli Variety

Hi, today we're here to talk about Piracicaba broccoli. The particular variety is called ‘Sidekick’.

Piracicaba in general is a heat tolerant mini broccoli that was bred in the town of Piracicaba in Brazil. Piracicaba in Brazil is a really warm weather town like most places in Brazil. There's a lot of 80–90°ree;F temperature all year and they wanted a broccoli that they could harvest during warm weather that would remain tender and sweet. That's how and where it was developed.

We began our selection project for 'Sidekick' Piracicaba in 2017 and the reason we did that is we found that the commercially available strains really didn't meet our quality expectations.

They tended to have floppy plants. Some plants had small heads, some had larger heads, some were a bright green and some were a blue green. So we selected for basically a real nice upright plant that wouldn't lodge. We selected for uniform dark green heads and really good side shoot production after the main head has been harvested.

So right now we're looking at some of the plants in our seed production crop right here. Here's a large headed plant right here. You can see the yellow on the flowers just starting to open. There's another plant over here. This one's a little bit smaller but it still looks like it'll be fine.

Here's another one here that's a little bit larger.

And then you can also see here in the in the plot, there are some gaps where there used to be plants.

That's because those plants either had the wrong color, we didn't like the architecture of the plant, or there was some other issue with it so we removed it.

That process is called roguing. So by roguing those plants before they flower, you get a much improved seed crop than if you would have let those ones flower and produce seeds as well.

In summary this is our seed crop of ‘Sidekick’ Piracicaba broccoli. We're really proud of this new selection and hope you'll give it a try.

Learn more about ‘Sidekick’

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