Lakeside Organic Gardens offers Sweet Baby Broccoli
After working with a proprietary plant breeder and trialing many different seed varieties, Lakeside Organic Gardens has found a “Sweet Baby Broccoli” (also known as broccolette and broccolini) that it believes is superior to others and has good supplies of it for the organic buyer.
“We started with 15 or 16 crosses and weeded them down to two or three,” said Dick Peixoto, owner/founder of the Watsonville, CA operation. “I can’t tell you how many plants I tasted in the field to make sure what we ended up with had the right flavor.”
He noted that some of the varieties tasted great but didn’t have a good appearance while the opposite was true with other varieties. Lakeside further whittled its choice to one new variety and began harvesting this year’s crop in mid-April with excellent supplies. The company will have steady supplies through summer.
Broccolini, as it is most often called, has become a very popular supermarket item in recent years, especially on the organic side of the aisle. However, Lakeside claims it is no longer a specialty item as it has gone mainstream with almost all supermarkets carrying it as a compliment to their broccoli SKUs.
