I will admit that I haven't seen much in the way of veg growing
discussion here, but having seen two threads on bread making, I'm
prepared to consider that anything goes that I do myself.

I've had a breakthrough this year on the brassica growing front and
having got sprout plants particularly like I've never seen in 30+
years of gardening, I felt it is worth passing on what seems to have
made the change.

Brassicas as all gardeners know suffer attacks on a number of fronts
and H &S have taken away most of our defence chemicals. Cabbage root
fly is the first attacker - can be got round with collars round the
young plant stem, but that's tedious to fix and costs. Slugs and then
cabbage white butterfly caterpillars are the next two assailants, and
if you are unlucky like me and have the clubroot fungus in the soil
too, you really are stuffed.

The clubroot I seem to have solved by growing the plants in 50mm plug
seed trays,but having found that wasn't totally reliable previously,
this year I trowelled out a vaguely 75mm hole in the ground, filled
that with JI2 compost and planted the 50mm plug into that. Not one
plant in around 100 has failed this year.

The other real winner was to cover all the plants with fleece -
reasonable quality stuff, not the 'shed' grade. I guessed this would
keep the root fly and butterflies at bay, but there's no slug damage
either and what I didn't know is that fleece raises the temperature
under it by a couple of degrees C, so all the growth has been so much
better.

OK one year's results aren't that good a statistic, but if I get the
same next year I can reduce the number of plants as the yield is now
higher than we can consume.

Rob