Photographs of this planting through the 2026 season, oldest first.
The photographs
Week of 20 JulyBrassica seedlings on 20 July, twenty of them up and none further along than a single pair of cotyledons, each blade notched at the tip into a small butterfly, with only two or three showing the toothed nub of a first true leaf in flat indoor light.Week of 27 JulyTwo sowings side by side on 28 July at quite different stages, twenty gray-green brassicas already puckering their first true leaves and beside them seedlings still on two, some of those on red-purple stems, under a lamp that blows the frame white above.Week of 27 JulyTwenty-five brassicas on 28 July, all at one stage and all under the same dull waxy bloom that flattens the light coming off them, except the newest leaf on each, a tight crinkled tuft of bright green at the growing point, lit from directly above.Week of 3 AugustTwo dozen brassicas in profile on 5 August, leaning drawn toward a lamp that blows their waxy blue-green upper surfaces to near-white and purple-backed seed leaves still hanging on below, with a dim figure reflected in the dark glass behind them.Week of 24 AugustOne young brassica on 27 August with no head or bud formed yet, six or seven broad blue-green leaves under a faint waxy bloom, wavy at the margin and pale down the midrib, a trowel still lying in the worked soil beside it.Week of 24 AugustLooking down into a galvanized bed on 27 August: young brassicas with broad blue-green waxy leaves and pale midribs, purple-stemmed ones among them at the right, and ferny carrot tops filling the left third. Nothing has headed yet.Week of 31 AugustA block of young blue-green rosettes set out in rows on 4 September, waxed so completely that the water never wetted them — it stands instead in separate silver beads, strung along the veins and pooled into lenses in the leaf hollows, under low warm sun.Week of 28 SeptemberBroad blue-green leaves with thick white midribs fill the frame on 29 September, several chewed to a vein skeleton at the edges and two plants at the right washed dull purple; a stray gray tuft rests on one bitten margin under flat, just-rained light.
